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Stellaris Dev Diary #95: Humanoids Species Pack

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. As said last week, today's dev diary is not about the Cherryh update at all, but rather something much more imminent: The Humanoids Species Pack
Pasted image at 2017_11_20 05_24 PM.png


Humanoids Species Pack
Over the last year or so, and especially in the last few months, there has been a lot of clamoring for more portraits and another ship-set like the one we added in Plantoids. Because of the amount of coder and content designer time we're putting into the major overhauls in the Cherryh update, we ended up with a lot of extra art time, and so we decided to oblige. Back in the Heinlein update, we added a bunch of free humanoid portraits that proved to be immensely popular - close to half of games started is with some variant of humanoid. Combine with there seeming to be a demand for a more 'classic western sci-fi' ship-set with sleeker lines and curves than the Mammalian one, and the design for the Humanoid Species Pack was born. Our artists have been quietly working away at it behind the scenes, and now it's almost ready.

So what's in the Humanoid Species Pack? Here is the feature list:
- 10 new Humanoid portraits
- A completely new ship set inspired by classic western sci-fi
- A new city set for Humanoids
- A new pre-scripted empire, the Fanatic Authoritarian/Materialist Voor Technocracy, with a portrait inspired by the 'loading screen aliens' from our own official art
- 3 new advisor voices offering alternative takes on existing ethics, based on the United Nations of Earth ('Dignified Xenophile'), Commonwealth of Man ('Disciplined Militarist') and Voor Technocracy ('Ruthless Materialist'). Samples from each of the new voices has been attached to the bottom of this post.
- 3 new music tracks that are remixes of classic Stellaris songs

Of course, the 5 Humanoid portraits that are already in the base game will remain free and available to everyone.

The Humanoids Species Pack will come out on December 7th, 2017 and will cost $7.99 US dollars or your regional equivalent. For those who want to buy it right now, pre-orders are available through the Paradox Shop. To pre-order, follow this link.

Next week we'll get back to talking about the Cherryh update on the topic of doomstacks (for real this time). Until then, I leave you with these awesome screenshots:
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Attachments

  • Commonwealth_VIR.wav
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  • UNE_Vir.wav
    1,4 MB · Views: 12.588
  • Voor_VIR.wav
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TheDungen said:
You do realize insect eyes are different than our eyes right? They wouldn't function if they weren't the way they are. And they still generally come in two clusters for exactly the depth perception reason, like in the case of flies.
That creature has eyes all over it's body I am talking about having two sets of eyes in a face on a head which can turn, there is no reason to have that, the extra pair is redundant.
Click to expand...

The extra pairs isn't redundant if you lost one eye in combat.

Have you ever tried to walk blind in your own house? Chaos.

I am already aware that other animal/insect/whatever eye don't function the same way. There is even a picture in the same article showing what they would have seen if we had their eye.

My point is just that if two pair wasn't enough to survive then you need more.
 
I'm always pleased to have more portraits, as you can never have too many ;)
 
Nice to see a kind of space orc (the one on the right of the top pic with green skin). Love to see more of the ships and kind of what the city/s will look like.

On a side note: The Alignment of Imakka remind me of a custom skin I downloaded once (they looked like cobra/human hybrids) and I did miss then when I removed it. Nice to see I can get something like that back
 
Tavior said:
The extra pairs isn't redundant if you lost one eye in combat.

Have you ever tried to walk blind in your own house? Chaos.

I am already aware that other animal/insect/whatever eye don't function the same way. There is even a picture in the same article showing what they would have seen if we had their eye.

My point is just that if two pair wasn't enough to survive then you need more.
Click to expand...

More on this, many species of spiders have different types of eyes. There's actually been multiple evolutions of the eye. Spiders have ocular eyes like ours with extra compound eyes. Compound eyes are great at detecting movement but have very poor visual definition.

There's tons of reasons an animal might have more than 2.
 
Tavior said:
The extra pairs isn't redundant if you lost one eye in combat.

Have you ever tried to walk blind in your own house? Chaos.

I am already aware that other animal/insect/whatever eye don't function the same way. There is even a picture in the same article showing what they would have seen if we had their eye.

My point is just that if two pair wasn't enough to survive then you need more.
Click to expand...
And despite that no creature on earth has redundancy eyes, eyes which more or less are just there in case you lose an original one. Now I'm not saying it's impossible that a creature may have more eyes I'm just saying 4+ eyes is a little over represented in the stellaris portraits. Especially avians for some reason.

Edit: I guess 4 eyes could serve the purpose of giving both 360 vision (like prey animals usually have) and depth vision (like predetorial animals usually have), but again I don't think there is any creature of earth with this combo, possibly because eyes are so fragile to begin with. Or possibly because two of everything is such a a basic thing in our genetic structure.
 
Alright so when we have species looking too closely to what we have on Earth, some people complain that the devs are lazy and that they should get some imagination.
When we have species with features not seen on Earth, some people complain because it doesn't make sense.

I really think they should put Deviant for the pre-set Human species
 
the glory of plain said:
Disciplined Militarist sounds like every other neo nazi in all that sifi
so pretty much what players expected
Click to expand...
More like a Prussian officer, which has nothing to do with either nazis or neonazis.
 
TheDungen said:
More like a Prussian officer, which has nothing to do with either nazis or neonazis.
Click to expand...

I agree for the neo one, but for regular nazi, I will disagree partially, as they are basically a corruption of Prussian virtues, at least when it come to non-psychotic one. The psychotic one, on the other end, are the same metastatic cancer of humanity that the neo are.

But to be more on topic, I do appreciate this new one, as sound a lot more militaristic then the current militarist voice, which sound is more suited to blood crazed warrior then a disciplined military.
 
Nurizeko said:
I don't think this pack is too bad, but I think the devs should enabled humanoids to be toggled on/off at game set-up.
Click to expand...

TheDungen said:
I don't know my big problem with the current portraits is that 50% of them seems to have 4 or more eyes.There is a as far as I can tell little reason for more than two eyes, once you have two you have depth perception.
Click to expand...

Tavior said:
The extra pairs isn't redundant if you lost one eye in combat.

Have you ever tried to walk blind in your own house? Chaos.

I am already aware that other animal/insect/whatever eye don't function the same way. There is even a picture in the same article showing what they would have seen if we had their eye.

My point is just that if two pair wasn't enough to survive then you need more.
Click to expand...

indeed, there are plenty of Earth lifeforms that have more than 2 eyes, and not just the bugs either(though they certainly make up the majority of critters that do), Starfish for example have one eye at the end of each of their legs.

and then there's this thing(and other Cambrian era animals):
Opabinia_BW2.jpg


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opabinia
 
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