Stellaris Dev Diary #69: Beyond Utopia

[Kaligoth]

The way i could see Deeper Federations is like reverse hive mind be one planet without the ability to colonise planets but every faction that spawns inside your planet then you can allow them to go off on there own to construct on a planet that is AI driven via relationships.

As for lack of having multiple planets you gain resources via favourable trade deals.

 

[tanny]

The easiest way is to make it like total war.
-Hostile fleet will shoot automatically in range.
-Emergency FTL can be pressed at any time. But requires more warmup to compensate.
-Speed difference, surround and specialization will encourage split fleet.
-Admirals buff and ease to micro encourage fleet merge.
-Can run by to target fire station. Or attack move enemy fleet.
-heat, asteroid, gravity will affect you
-some weapons are equipped with limited FTL allowing easier chasing. Buffing warp and hyperlane to compensate.
-New megastructure. Death star basically, minus that major flaw to be destroyed in one bomb. To occupy it, You must destroy it's mega fortress. Then you're allowed to board before enemy can repair. It's a massive station complex which aura the entire system. 200 naval capacity and a huge maintenance discount for ships in orbit.
-Also espionage. Most militaristic use them except hive mind and honorbound warrior. More friendly uses are to support rebel. Steal tech, kill pop and more.
They can mostly do anything but are specialized. But some are very restricted.
Spiritualist=mind control,read even for tech steal
Materialist=hack for data, jamming production, tech steal
Pacifist = diplomatic (You can know your friend's data so you can know what to help
Militarist = find enemy weakness
Xenophobe= kill pop
Authoritarian= counter spy.
Egalitarian= cause unrest
Xenophile = secretly supporting/suppressing
faction/ethics.

-spend science, analyze debris or spy to gain temporary advantage against foes. Or deploy them all for deadly outcome.

-stealth ships can be very tactical, spy ship is automatically quite stealthy.

 

[Pitxur]

Fleet eficiency should decrease with size. Moving 200 frigate should be more difficult than 20 Dreadnought, for example, although admiral should help. Admirals should have ship efficiency cap, etc. People from HOI could help in this. April's fool day joke could be a serious fix

 

[thekaje]

Way more interested in more non-war gameplay (especially economics and trade, which are noticeably absent from the list) than I am in "reworked" anything, especially combat and politics that already have functional mechanics.

My impression is that Wiz likes "reworking" a lot more than he enjoys adding new stuff.

 

[grommile]

Way more interested in more non-war gameplay (especially economics and trade, which are noticeably absent from the list) than I am in "reworked" anything, especially combat and politics that already have functional mechanics.

Lots of paying customers (and, I dare say, a fair few of the Stellaris dev team) are annoyed with one aspect or another of the existing combat and politics systems.

 

[thekaje]

Lots of paying customers (and, I dare say, a fair few of the Stellaris dev team) are annoyed with one aspect or another of the existing combat and politics systems.

Well, as a paying customer, I think the current systems work well enough to last until we have an actual economy and trade routes. No sense reworking systems that have got us 1 year out since release, when we still don't have a way to make trade-focused civs (due to no trade!), no meaningful trade agreements, no trade routes, no civilian economy, no dynamic pirates attacking trade routes, no smugglers, etc.

You can rework combat until the cows come home, but diplomacy and war will become infinitely more interesting when you add a real economy into the game to add diversity and complexity to galactic affairs.

 

[grommile]

That, sadly, ends up being a justification for it not mattering that anything is half-assed, because you can always come up with something that should be added before improving the existing things.

 

[thekaje]

That, sadly, ends up being a justification for it not mattering that anything is half-assed, because you can always come up with something that should be added before improving the existing things.

Huh? I'm not saying it doesn't matter that your pew-pew isn't fun enough for you, just that I disagree that reworking existing systems is more important than addressing the massive gaping hole in Stellaris's attempt to represent a believable galaxy.

 

[durbal]

That, sadly, ends up being a justification for it not mattering that anything is half-assed, because you can always come up with something that should be added before improving the existing things.

...no. You're saying here that priorities shouldn't exist. WTF.

 

[Marcelo]

Still no mention of diplomacy changes, trade and espionage...1.5 and 1.6 are full of neat and cool stuff, but it's not what will make this game 'grand strategy in a galactic scale' as often said before release. This is puzzling as we know Paradox knows how to do theses things, so maybe having a tall vs wide game (using the same metaphor we use for empires) is a conscious decision based on player base or whatever.

So my doubt (and it seems it will remain a doubt for months or years) is if these will ever come at all.

 

[markmid]

Please rebalance and optimize fleet size! Running around with a 1000 ship fleet does not add to enjoyment of the game, makes space battle not fun to watch (crazy mess of colors), and destroys CPU fps.

Depending on the Titan and Dreadnaught costs it could solve this issue. As long as the models are optimized of course.

 

[grommile]

Still no mention of diplomacy changes, trade and espionage...1.5 and 1.6 are full of neat and cool stuff, but it's not what will make this game 'grand strategy in a galactic scale' as often said before release. This is puzzling as we know Paradox knows how to do theses things,

No, Paradox do not know how to do espionage - or at least, not well enough for their implementations to be a net benefit to the game.

 

[fcmsaab]

We crafted big defense system overhaul wishlist on this thread: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...k-stellaris-defensive-gameplay.1011881/page-3

@Wiz please read it <3!!

 

[TheVoidDragon]

Ship appearance that differs for each empire, so no two empires' ships look exactly the same.

It's been a while since I've played much but i have been following the dev diaries, but from what i've seen I really don't understand how this can be thought of as "at a satisfactory level" as it is in the game at the moment. I'm not saying you haven't worked hard on it it's not any good, but what's there seems to be more like it's just a foundation for something that needs to be expanded on, not something that it pretty much satisfactory and you just might add more later. Same situation with the 'tall' empires, as well.

Unless i've forgot something, all that was done for the ships appearance was to add coloured trails to them that match their Empire colours. That does nothing to the ship itself, i don't think anyone here expected something as simple as that would be what that meant. Yes they don't look "exactly the same" now because of the different colours but it does nothing to help with the actual ship part of the ships themselves being repeated over and over. For that i was expecting something more along the lines of several different weapon and chassis pieces that would be mixed together to add more variety of ships.

 

[Garfazz Steamfang]

It's been a while since I've played much but i have been following the dev diaries, but from what i've seen I really don't understand how this can be thought of as "at a satisfactory level" as it is in the game at the moment. I'm not saying you haven't worked hard on it it's not any good, but what's there seems to be more like it's just a foundation for something that needs to be expanded on, not something that it pretty much satisfactory and you just might add more later. Same situation with the 'tall' empires, as well.

Unless i've forgot something, all that was done for the ships appearance was to add coloured trails to them that match their Empire colours. That does nothing to the ship itself, i don't think anyone here expected something as simple as that would be what that meant. Yes they don't look "exactly the same" now because of the different colours but it does nothing to help with the actual ship part of the ships themselves being repeated over and over. For that i was expecting something more along the lines of several different weapon and chassis pieces that would be mixed together to add more variety of ships.

Or just an alternative model of each ship like in MOO or Endless Space.

 

[Marcelo]

No, Paradox do not know how to do espionage - or at least, not well enough for their implementations to be a net benefit to the game.

Ok, fair enough. Do you think that diplomacy and trade would not as well?

 

[Derp]

QoL request: an "underemployed" alert that shows if pops are working tiles that have bonuses but no building

 

[DarkFenX]

It's been a while since I've played much but i have been following the dev diaries, but from what i've seen I really don't understand how this can be thought of as "at a satisfactory level" as it is in the game at the moment. I'm not saying you haven't worked hard on it it's not any good, but what's there seems to be more like it's just a foundation for something that needs to be expanded on, not something that it pretty much satisfactory and you just might add more later. Same situation with the 'tall' empires, as well.

Unless i've forgot something, all that was done for the ships appearance was to add coloured trails to them that match their Empire colours. That does nothing to the ship itself, i don't think anyone here expected something as simple as that would be what that meant. Yes they don't look "exactly the same" now because of the different colours but it does nothing to help with the actual ship part of the ships themselves being repeated over and over. For that i was expecting something more along the lines of several different weapon and chassis pieces that would be mixed together to add more variety of ships.

I mostly play zoomed out, and all I need from ship visuals - being able to understand which fleet belongs to which country. Possibly the only time when I'm looking at ships is when fighting initial spawn of pirates. And that's with me loving eye-candy stuff. Stellaris has too much stuff going on.

Thus, basically, I would prefer time of development and artist department to be spent elsewhere rather than revisiting this point.

 

[TheVoidDragon]

I mostly play zoomed out, and all I need from ship visuals - being able to understand which fleet belongs to which country. Possibly the only time when I'm looking at ships is when fighting initial spawn of pirates. And that's with me loving eye-candy stuff. Stellaris has too much stuff going on.

Thus, basically, I would prefer time of development and artist department to be spent elsewhere rather than revisiting this point.

You may play zoomed out yourself, and i do as well most of the time, but that doesn't change that the ability to zoom in and see what ships look like is a part of the game that even with the changes that supposedly make it "satisfactory" it feels very underwhelming and like it's an incomplete part of the game. Even when it comes to just the ship models themselves it feels like it needs more work, some of the different weapon types (as in, the turrets themselves) don't even have a different appearance when placed on ships, for example.

I'm not saying it's something important that should be done right away and they do say they might add more to it later on, but i don't see how with that relativity small change that was made it's suddenly been deemed "satisfactory" when the problem is still exactly the same as it was before; the ships of some empires tend to look identical to those of other empires. The trail colour change doesn't address the actual problem.

 

[Sapa Inca]

@Wiz Some chance of hive mind events being rewritten/reworked in the future?