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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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20Manuel02 said:
How about finally fixing Missiles? I love them but it is just a handicap to play with them.
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Except for the swarm-type missiles. Those are great, particularly if mixed with carrier ops. Want to reliably wipe out corvettes and destroyers while providing a lot of distracting targets for enemy PD, Flak, and fighters that they just can't hit: Whirlwind missiles are your friends.

But yes, an overhaul of missiles and carrier ops in general. Some time would be neat some time in future.
 
Deepening diplomatic and adding economic elements would be extremely welcome in my opinion because I play as some sort of pacifist.

I've posted about this idea on other feeds, but adding a fluid empire stability modifier (changes stability each month a little depending on the ethics, factions, races, policies, etc. in your empire based on how you're managing things) that's linked to unity could add significantly to the complexity of governing throughout the game. If you have high stability, you produce more unity and perhaps get boosts to influence, happiness, etc. If you have low stability, your unity points (and other various governing aspects such as happiness, unrest, the appearance of deviant factions, separatists, etc.) take a hit.

The goal of this idea is to make unity something more than a clock wound by building certain buildings that tells you when to pick a perk, and to add deeper levels of internal governance.
 
Stability sounds like "let's make Egalitarian Spiritualist Xenophiles even easier to play"...
 
Thought it was interesting watching the Twitch stream. @Wiz clearly described the Domination tradition as a niche tradition only really relevant to certain play-styles. They then moved on and never really dug any deeper on that topic. This to me highlights the biggest problem with Traditions i.e. that players are currently forced to go down trees which aren't really relevant to the game they are playing. This leads to selecting traditions becoming boring. You are selecting uninteresting buffs simply because you have to to get access to the Perks. I really do hope Traditions receive some attention very soon i.e. ideas like 10 traditions per tree, 2 perks possible per tree, no need to bottom out all trees, no need to even start some trees etc. At the moment it becomes a chore after getting the traditions which are interesting/relevant to your game.
 
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PaulMClem said:
Thought it was interesting watching the Twitch stream. @Wiz clearly described the Domination tradition as a niche tradition only really relevant to certain play-styles. They then moved on and never really dug any deeper on that topic. This to me highlights the biggest problem with Traditions i.e. that players are currently forced to go down trees which aren't really relevant to the game they are playing. This leads to selecting traditions becoming boring. You are selecting uninteresting buffs simply because you have to to get access to the Perks. I really do hope Traditions receive some attention very soon i.e. ideas like 10 traditions per tree, 2 perks possible per tree, no need to bottom out all trees, no need to even adopt some traditions etc. At the moment it becomes a chore after getting the trees which are interesting/relevant to your game.
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Yea I agree. Since Utopia I've struggeled to find good reasons to why not go for the opening of the Prosperity branch in almost every game. It is like half of the traditions aren't even interesting openers and I tend to go for a few only which is pretty dull tbh.
 
Reviewed the OP, been reading all the responses and watched the stream... Wiz, my humble opinion is that you guys are going the right direction with the next update. We all seem to agree that Stellaris has so much potential, and trying to tackle everything at once is like trying to "defend everything at once" ... you end up losing everything. Stay focused on one major area at a time, and I think empire customization and internal politics is a great area to prioritize. Maybe economy and trade after that.
 
grommile said:
Stability sounds like "let's make Egalitarian Spiritualist Xenophiles even easier to play"...
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Actually I was thinking by having the state of your empire erode or increase stability over time would actually make Xenophiles more difficult to play by increasing stability erosion as different species enter your empire (no mater how much you may be a xenophile, there's going to be some inter-species conflict when completely different species with often competing values start living together.)
Having a multi-species empire could then make you have to spend your influence on programs to help integrate communities and resolve their differences. Xenophiles would have to build and spend a lot of influence to keep up their unity in that sense if different minded, repulsive, or just extremely different species began moving into their empire.
 
I would love something like this to be added

  • the ability to become a fallen empire/accepted into the category of a fallen empire there for adding the ability to build their buildings (antimatter plant) and their ships (battlecruisers and titains)
obsessively this would be extremely difficult and might even require a major story line to be completed
 
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