Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. We are now officially back from our break in communication and will be resuming weekly dev diaries and streams as usual. Today's dev diary is going to be about crises, and how we're changing them in the future, particularly in regards to the AI crisis. Before I dive into it, I also want to mention that we are still working to address the issues caused by 1.6 and get another bugfixing patch out, the process has just been somewhat complicated by the Bradbury multiplayer beta. See this post for details and discussion of Bradbury/1.6.2 and keep this thread focused on the topic at hand.
Crisis Improvements & AI
Some time back, when I was asked about issues with the crises and the AI crisis in particular, I said that I did not want to put a great deal of resources into improving the end-game when those resources could be put into the mid-game instead, and that these improvements and fixes would come when we felt the mid-game were in a good enough place to justify them. I now feel that we are in that place, and as such we are going to make a major push to improve, balance and rework the endgame crises for future updates.
Probably the most significant change to the non-AI crises is the addition of a Crisis Strength setting in game setup, replacing the old setting to turn endgame crises on or off. It also replaces the scaling to galaxy size and habitable worlds, and has a default setting for each of the galaxy sizes. This setting allows you to control the strength of crises, all the way down from 0.25x of their base power to a massive and likely unstoppable 5x power boost to their fleets. As before, you can also turn off crises entirely.
Additionally, we've also spent a considerable amount of time improving the crisis AI, both in terms of how the crises themselves behave and how regular AI empires react to them. Crises should now expand in a more logical fashion and be better at defending and fortifying the space they have taken over. AI empires, in turn, should be far better at understanding when they are under mortal threat and react to a rapidly spreading crisis by banding together against it and coordinating their fleets to fight it.
The Contingency
The old AI rebellion crisis suffers from a number of issues, mostly stemming from the fact that it's so different from the other crises. While the Extradimensionals and Scourge are large invasions that have to be fought with fleets, the AI rebellion is supposed to be primarily an internal crisis, with the dangers stemming from infiltration and subversion rather than outright warfare. The problem with this is twofold: The game mechanics do not support it, and it is inherently unsatisfying. Whereas huge fleets roaming around scourging the galaxy of life is an easily understood threat that can be fought by empires coming together and pooling their resources against the invaders, the AI crisis mostly ends up as a series of frustrating events affecting empires in isolation, or 'Spaceport Destruction Simulator' as it's been called.
In addition to the gameplay problems, there is also the narrative problems: Why exactly do rebelling synths pose a galaxy-wide threat? If sapient machines are so powerful, why are ascended synthetic empires not on the power level of an endgame crisis? Even if we were to simply boost the AI crisis by giving it massive fleets, this really doesn't make much sense that a handful of rebelling synths from a handful of regular empires were able to amass such fleet assets in the first place. It's for this reason that we decided to go back to the drawing board and remake the AI crisis in the mold of the other two endgame crises, while retaining as much as possible of the 'synth infiltration' flavor from the old crisis. Enter the Contingency.
Without wishing to spoil too much, The Contingency is an ancient AI whose purpose appears to be to sterilize the galaxy of all higher biological life and control or destroy all other Synthetic life forms. At the start of the game, it is dormant, broadcasting a weak signal across the galaxy that affects Synthetics in unpredictable ways. The chance of the Contingency waking up is directly tied to the prevalence of Synthetic life in the galaxy, and should it wake, it will attempt to use its signal to control Synthetics and force them to aid it in its implacable task of galactic sterilization. Unlike the previous AI crisis, the Contingency has formidable fleet assets with which to carry out this task and has to be fought both in space and at home, as it makes use of subversion and infiltration to soften up its targets before the sterilization units arrive.
Just as with the Extradimensionals and Scourge, there is additional events and hidden lore to be discovered regarding the Contingency, and synthetic empires will have special interactions and challenges related to it. The Contingency completely replaces the old AI uprising crisis, but we are currently looking at also implementing a new AI uprising, not as a galactic scale crisis but as a midgame event localized to one or a few empires. But more on that later!
Crisis Improvements & AI
Some time back, when I was asked about issues with the crises and the AI crisis in particular, I said that I did not want to put a great deal of resources into improving the end-game when those resources could be put into the mid-game instead, and that these improvements and fixes would come when we felt the mid-game were in a good enough place to justify them. I now feel that we are in that place, and as such we are going to make a major push to improve, balance and rework the endgame crises for future updates.
Probably the most significant change to the non-AI crises is the addition of a Crisis Strength setting in game setup, replacing the old setting to turn endgame crises on or off. It also replaces the scaling to galaxy size and habitable worlds, and has a default setting for each of the galaxy sizes. This setting allows you to control the strength of crises, all the way down from 0.25x of their base power to a massive and likely unstoppable 5x power boost to their fleets. As before, you can also turn off crises entirely.
Additionally, we've also spent a considerable amount of time improving the crisis AI, both in terms of how the crises themselves behave and how regular AI empires react to them. Crises should now expand in a more logical fashion and be better at defending and fortifying the space they have taken over. AI empires, in turn, should be far better at understanding when they are under mortal threat and react to a rapidly spreading crisis by banding together against it and coordinating their fleets to fight it.
The Contingency
The old AI rebellion crisis suffers from a number of issues, mostly stemming from the fact that it's so different from the other crises. While the Extradimensionals and Scourge are large invasions that have to be fought with fleets, the AI rebellion is supposed to be primarily an internal crisis, with the dangers stemming from infiltration and subversion rather than outright warfare. The problem with this is twofold: The game mechanics do not support it, and it is inherently unsatisfying. Whereas huge fleets roaming around scourging the galaxy of life is an easily understood threat that can be fought by empires coming together and pooling their resources against the invaders, the AI crisis mostly ends up as a series of frustrating events affecting empires in isolation, or 'Spaceport Destruction Simulator' as it's been called.
In addition to the gameplay problems, there is also the narrative problems: Why exactly do rebelling synths pose a galaxy-wide threat? If sapient machines are so powerful, why are ascended synthetic empires not on the power level of an endgame crisis? Even if we were to simply boost the AI crisis by giving it massive fleets, this really doesn't make much sense that a handful of rebelling synths from a handful of regular empires were able to amass such fleet assets in the first place. It's for this reason that we decided to go back to the drawing board and remake the AI crisis in the mold of the other two endgame crises, while retaining as much as possible of the 'synth infiltration' flavor from the old crisis. Enter the Contingency.
Without wishing to spoil too much, The Contingency is an ancient AI whose purpose appears to be to sterilize the galaxy of all higher biological life and control or destroy all other Synthetic life forms. At the start of the game, it is dormant, broadcasting a weak signal across the galaxy that affects Synthetics in unpredictable ways. The chance of the Contingency waking up is directly tied to the prevalence of Synthetic life in the galaxy, and should it wake, it will attempt to use its signal to control Synthetics and force them to aid it in its implacable task of galactic sterilization. Unlike the previous AI crisis, the Contingency has formidable fleet assets with which to carry out this task and has to be fought both in space and at home, as it makes use of subversion and infiltration to soften up its targets before the sterilization units arrive.
Just as with the Extradimensionals and Scourge, there is additional events and hidden lore to be discovered regarding the Contingency, and synthetic empires will have special interactions and challenges related to it. The Contingency completely replaces the old AI uprising crisis, but we are currently looking at also implementing a new AI uprising, not as a galactic scale crisis but as a midgame event localized to one or a few empires. But more on that later!
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