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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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Please add a functional economy that scales into the mid-late game. The early game economy is fine and requires resource management. But then after that, it's so easy to reach a critical mass and then the economy just goes crazy with thousands of energy credits and minerals flowing at rates faster than they can possibly be used.
 
Same goes for 'intelligent' and 'erudite'. And because all of these are 'beneficial traits', you can not even remove and replace them.

That's simply not true. The access to the Erudite trait is granted by the Genetic Resequencing technology (requirement: Evolutionary Mastery perk), which grants also the ability to remove beneficial traits such as Intelligent.
 
What about the factions? You could fix them somehow because most of the population is often materialists.
Practically nothing we do not interfere.
Can you make it more difficult? Civil War? Schizma in religious empire?
 
That's simply not true. The access to the Erudite trait is granted by the Genetic Resequencing technology (requirement: Evolutionary Mastery perk), which grants also the ability to remove beneficial traits such as Intelligent.

I might actually have encountered a bug then. I still have the savegame, guess ill post it again as a bug report.
 
Please add a functional economy that scales into the mid-late game. The early game economy is fine and requires resource management. But then after that, it's so easy to reach a critical mass and then the economy just goes crazy with thousands of energy credits and minerals flowing at rates faster than they can possibly be used.

They already did with Consumer Goods. They have a basic cost of 0.5 Minerals increased by 0.01 for every planet beyond your homeworld. So theoretically there is a limit where adding another planet actually hurts your resource net gain. Maybe the scaling is not drastic enough yet though.
 
Can 1.6 focus heavily on fixing Crisis and all events in the game plz?? Crisis is one of the major feature of Stellaris.


You want them to spend less time on bug-fixing and QoL changes? I don't mind waiting a bit longer if this means they fix more stuff...

I think he's saying that, as they will not add anything new from the ground and will just fix issues, there is no need for so many development time.

Good. But pretty please - FIX ALL NEW BUGS before release. Cuz impression about Utopia was totally ruined by all those bugs.

I agree.
 
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.

This is true. We have things that we literally paid for that are not working. War in Heaven is a PAID feature released half a year ago and still don't work and have some crazy mechanics (like a Empire lose = THEY DISAPPEAR).

The Crisis itself is a major feature (it made me buy this game) and still don't work even being released with the base game.

I really think they need to focus completely on fixing everything that is broken before working on something new.
 
I would like simple thing to be implented. To see how galaxy is changing. I want to see on which conditions someone accepted peace (Liberated this planet, ceded this planed etc.) Now, I see galaxy is changing, but I dont know under what conditions.

P.S. I am definitely looking after Deeper Federations and Space U.N. and some covert diplomacy actions/espionage. Those are my favourite because I am more into destroying other nations from within.
 
They already did with Consumer Goods. They have a basic cost of 0.5 Minerals increased by 0.01 for every planet beyond your homeworld. So theoretically there is a limit where adding another planet actually hurts your resource net gain. Maybe the scaling is not drastic enough yet though.

Have you played the game? I just dump minerals and energy everywhere because otherwise they just get lost. They are endless. Even with 50 planets it would requires 10 minerals being mined on a planet (not even counting mining stations and stuff) to satisfy consumer goods.
 
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

Fleets can already do this... transport ships cannot though.

Just set your fleet to Aggressive stance, send it to the system in question. It will clear out all military targets, then start bombarding a planet.
 
What about the factions? You could fix them somehow because most of the population is often materialists.
Practically nothing we do not interfere.
Can you make it more difficult? Civil War? Schizma in religious empire?

Yeah, that would be nice. I agree that the factions tend to be of the same ethics as the main empire. It could be interresting as a big empire to have internal pop problems, such as revolution or having a Space Hitler inside your pacifist empire.

Also, I know that you guys at Paradox have a hard work but have you considered faction related events?
 
Fleets can already do this... transport ships cannot though.

Just set your fleet to Aggressive stance, send it to the system in question. It will clear out all military targets, then start bombarding a planet.

Thanks, I did not know this (the bombarding part). Although it would be even nicer if I could have it go directly to bombard or chase down a specific fleet, and ignore civilian targets.
 
Have you played the game? I just dump minerals and energy everywhere because otherwise they just get lost. They are endless. Even with 50 planets it would requires 10 minerals being mined on a planet (not even counting mining stations and stuff) to satisfy consumer goods.

Yes, I have played the game. 50 planets with an estimated average population of 16 require about 800 minerals each month as consumer goods (assuming normal living standard, no other modifiers), half of it caused by the addtional scaling with planet number.
 
Thanks, I did not know this (the bombarding part). Although it would be even nicer if I could have it go directly to bombard or chase down a specific fleet, and ignore civilian targets.

They do ignore civilian targets with aggressive stance as much as manually ordering them around ignores it. Aggressive stance means they will target fleets, military stations, spaceports, bombarding planet in approximately that order. They will not chase a fleet out of the system they are in though without giving them a direct order to attack said fleet (which causes issues with different FTL types).
 
Was I really the only one who thought that DD 69 would contain... well, let's say, some "easter egg"? ;)

But... it did!

Also, fleet templates are the number 1-10 priorities as far as I'm concerned. The rest is macro builders.

I mean, there are, obviously, other things that I care about, but the primary reason I use doomstacks is not having to deal with maintenance of 50 armies. Similarly the relatively low diversity of these fleets, despite my rp-ey leanings. There are other reasons for both, and they're covered extensively elsewhere, but those two are mine.
 
I didn't say it isn't doable. I say it didn't really fit gameplay-wise, and "lore-wise". To begin with genemoding really imply that you're supposed tweak species differently it different places. But with PF you have to do it at once (and if you mess it up - like with colony ships, you're in trouble). Not only it severely reduce the benefits of this method, it cost a huge amount of Science to do so. Not to mention that Bio-paths techs can cause a havoc in xenophobe empire.

I don't really see the problem fitting in gameplay wise. The new bio-ascension traits can pretty much make one species capable of having acceptable habitability on all planets. Tweaking different species to fit certain roles better is objectively better in terms of pay out but requires you to do a horrendous amount of micromanagement with resettlement and placing the right POPs on the right planets on the right tiles. It's a lot more work which should be rewarding imo.

I also don't see why a xenophobe empire would be thrown into chaos because of what is essentially gene-therapy. Just because you hate aliens doesn't mean don't want to cure cancer in your own species using science. And since you would be modifying the entire species everyone would still be the same as each other and therefore there's no reason for them to fear any "others" as a result of that. Everyone would still be considered "pure", and might even be considered more "pure/perfect" than they were before.

I do agree that the colony ship bug is super annoying and i hope it gets fixed in 1.6.

For a synth path - it does feel like something PF would do, but policies related to synth and their rights (or, i must say, an inability to differentiate between homemade and xeno synths) is a major roadblock here.

I don't understand what you mean. The game already does differentiate between your synth-ascended race and normal synths. It's doesn't differentiate between the robots/androids/synths that all the different species in the galaxy builds (which is probably on purpose so the species list doesn't get flooded with 3 separate robot/android/synth species for each biological species that builds them) But your synth-ascended race (and other synth-ascended races if there are any) are regarded by the game as separate species from the galaxy wide non-ascended synths as far as i can tell.
 
I like the features you're planning, but I'm adding my vote for some sort of trade system with routes and more and varied resources also.

Also, I wouldn't mind some more eye candy to make the galaxy more immersive and lively. Off the top of my head: little civilian ships flying to and fro, asteroids, solar flares and more. :)
 
  • Deeper Federations that start out as loose alliances and can eventually be turned into single states through diplomatic maneuvering.
  • More story events and reactive narratives that give a sense of an unfolding story as you play.
  • More interesting mechanics for pre-FTL civilizations.

For what it is worth, those are my top three (emphasis on the last two).