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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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Can we have non-state actors and corporate entities with more politics, intrigue and violent means of enforcing rule as authoritarians?

Also I'd like the games to be extended with more technologies crises events ect so we have longer than 200 year games and more like 1000 year games. This way mega-structuring will be a nice long-term investment.
 
Biggest issue? Lag. No idea where it comes from but when it takes 5 MINUTES to cycle a month on "fastest" something is definitely wrong. Having it come and go depending on what you are looking at makes it very frustrating.

A graphical costly universe filled with multiple ai empires, creatures, factions with events. Simply, you need to a more powerful machine or to turn down the game settings. I feel your pain though. I get serious lag in a normal galaxy.... :(
 
What about a custom galaxy mechanic with a peace timer? This way you could create an advanced empire in the Galaxy and you have to ally with other empires to defeat it. A sort of editor where you could play both on and offline..... just a thought.
 
Great news. Taking the time to focus on fixes is a classy (and much needed) move. Seems like Stellaris is on a really solid trajectory of improvement and development. Thanks for all your hard work and for the great 1.5 update/expansion. Can't wait to see what's next.
 
Deeper Federations that start out as loose alliances and can eventually be turned into single states through diplomatic maneuvering.

Really looking forward to this feature the most right now.

Suggestion: transform federations into single states using federation wide treaties ( IE migration, research), and maybe make it possible to use influence points to get members to vote the way we want them to.
 
I need my trade and economy!

The spice must floooooow!
 
"More interesting mechanics for pre-FTL civilizations."

Star Age (capable of construct starships without FTL) civilisations, please. There is a mod on this, but the limitations of the game prevent it from being satisfactory.
 
  • 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.


these are what I am most interested in especially the Federations, the space UN, superweapons and of course the doomstack issue
 
So from what I read a Military themed expansion is very likely. I feel like that really needs to happen.

Specifically, What I think needs to happen in that is:
  • Better Invasion / Army interface - I like watching the circles deplete during an invasion (reminds me of the fun I had in Galactic Civilizations II and it's Invasion mechanics), but selecting the individual armies is overly cluttered and it's just not worth it when you do finally pick an army unit to outfit it with the upgrade. I keep thinking that the interface for the Ship Builder would be a great template for creating an "Army Maker" that has more options and depth (My armies have x weapons with y armor and this other thing that also neat and awesome.
  • A Shipyard / Navy "Mega build que" or something interface - During the mid and late game, when an Empire has at least 5 or nearing a dozen worlds (or at least when there is at least one sector's worth), there are a lot of Spaceports that COULD be helping to build my new fleet cooperatively all at once. Similar in a completely different way to the Armies, it's tedious to go around, find and keep track of the appropriate Spaceports for this 'Fleet build order', especially when planets are hidden inn Sectors and are not quickly selectable. Rally points have been a great help to get around this problem, even allow this kind of micromanagement production strategy/tactic, but I really wish there was a more direct quick-select or interface for this stuff.
 
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Good to hear of the new patch.

Some tweaks to the Traditions & Unity system would be welcomed. Preferably more tradition trees, BUT introduce a hard-cap so that not everything can be unlocked so that late-game empires can be differenciated.