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Stellaris Dev Diary #261 - Challenge Accepted

Hi everyone, I hope you’ve had a wonderful summer.

Today we’ll start going into some of the things planned for the upcoming Stellaris 3.5 “Fornax” update.

New Difficulty Settings​

With the improvements that have been made to the AI over the past few updates, we’ve noticed that new players are finding things a bit more challenging and there have been some requests for an easier difficulty setting. As such, we’re adding a Civilian difficulty setting, and making Cadet the default difficulty.

Civilian difficulty further increases the bonuses players receive in Cadet difficulty, with an additional bonus towards completing First Contact.

Civilian Difficulty


Now, we’re aware that most of you that read these dev diaries are looking for a greater challenge rather than the opposite, but we have some things for you as well.

Two new settings are being added that allow you to better customize the difficulty of your game.

Rather than being a simple toggle, Scaling Difficulty can now be set to Off, Mid Game, or Late Game - if set to Mid Game, AI bonuses will scale from zero to the selected difficulty by the Mid-Game Start Year. Late Game will provide the current behavior of scaling to the selected difficulty by the End-Game Start Year.

Mid Game Scaling Difficulty


Difficulty Adjusted AI Modifiers is a new toggle that can dramatically increase the strength of the AI on higher difficulty levels as the game progresses. If enabled, the AI bonuses apply to all other modifiers the AI accumulates.

As an example, the Geothermal Fracking technology grants +20% Minerals from Miners. On Grand Admiral difficulty with this setting enabled, this technology would instead grant AI empires a 40% bonus.

Difficulty Adjusted AI Modifiers


Fornax will also bring one other tiny little addition to the galaxy generation settings for players looking for an extra challenge.

Crisis Type: All


The Crisis Type setting will now have an option for All, which will spawn every crisis sequentially, with each subsequent crisis being stronger than the previous. The galaxy is counting on you. No pressure.

Species Pack Achievements​

Stellaris achievements have always been a bit tongue in cheek and enjoyable to make, if not always enjoyable to complete. (I’m looking at you, Galatron achievements!)

We’ve submitted to the demands of our artists, and will be adding three achievements to each species pack that has previously been released.

While Stellaris achievements have traditionally always been careful to not require “cross-dlc”, we didn’t enforce that restriction to some of these since we felt that if you have all of the Species Packs you probably have everything else already.

Here’s one example from each.

Aquatics:
Fishing for Trouble

Fishing for Trouble - As an angler empire, provoke a Fallen Empire into declaring war on you and win.

Necroids:
There's a Zombie on my Lawn

There’s a Zombie on my Lawn - As a Necroid empire, eradicate a Plantoid empire, or vice-versa, without blowing up their final planet.

Lithoids:
Rock Beats Paper

Rock Beats Paper - As a Lithoid empire, show the Galactic Community exactly what you think of that strongly worded letter.

Humanoids:
Strange Mood

Strange Mood - As a Master Crafter empire, fully construct a megastructure while you have a Covenant with a Shroud entity.

Plantoids:
DIY

DIY - As an Idyllic Bloom empire, convert the junk worlds of the Ketling Star Pack into Gaia Worlds.

Next Week​

Next week I'll spoil more of the achievements, and go into some quality of life changes. Iggy will also give a compiled update on relic changes based on your feedback.

Quality of Life Spoilers


We'll be a bit slow with replies to this dev diary as we're currently at a staff conference. We'll catch up as we can.

See you next week!
 
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Starting difficulty for scaling would still be appreciated. Starting with commodore, ending with GA etc.

but mid game max difficulty will help a lot. still the first few years are so important, boni here would be most impactful.
 
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Stellaris 3.5 “NotLikeThis” update.

Also can't wait to to earn all those new shiny new achievements in my 100+ mod games. Welcome back and hope you had good R&R. Lets hope those summer experiments where successful.
 
Please allow us to select the starting difficulty for Scaling. It's such a no brainer. With the way snowballing works in these kinds of games the bonuses are very important at the beginning to build up a solid foundation. It's far more important than setting the ending strength.

And I agree that Crisis-like multipliers for some other mid game things and mini-crises would be nice.
 
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Balance is tough because everything is designed to snowball. More resources = more resources. Some people get to a "50 year" point in 25 years. some take 100 years. There is just so much margin for error. But IMO the biggest issue I have seen is the AI empires cant sustain any losses without collapsing. Win one decent war knocking out a Core planet and the AI will never recover. Hopefully that has been improved since I last played.
 
Oh also I was wondering if the tech tree on some techs gonna be rework... Mostly engineering because it's the only place it applies. So instead of rolling Titans tech or have a higher chance to roll it at year 100+.

So instead could some techs have a higher chance to roll set on the slider.

So mid/end game start year you have a higher chance to roll battle ships & titans and so on.
 
Eladrin said:
Fornax is a constellation originally called le Fourneau Chymique, the Chemical Furnace.

The patch isn't named as a Mass Effect reference.
Click to expand...

Assuming that this is actually true, how long did people last before the jokes started once the decision to name it that was made? Minutes? Seconds?
 
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Eladrin said:
Rather than being a simple toggle, Scaling Difficulty can now be set to Off, Mid Game, or Late Game - if set to Mid Game, AI bonuses will scale from zero to the selected difficulty by the Mid-Game Start Year. Late Game will provide the current behavior of scaling to the selected difficulty by the End-Game Start Year.
Click to expand...
That's a nice addition, but the biggest problem with scaling difficulty is that it always starts at 0, giving the player ample opportunity to abuse the weak AI in the early game.

This allows for snowballing that the AI just can't keep up with, even when it eventually gets its full bonuses earlier than before. An option to set what difficulty bonuses the AI starts with (in addition to the one they end with) is what's needed to turn scaling difficulty into a good option for advanced players in my opinion.
 
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Always good to see more game setup options, but there should still be a lot more. I recommend making an "Advanced Settings" menu with more granular options for veteran players. For instance things like Fallen Empire Strength, Leviathan Strength etc, since those are often considered too weak these days when playing on hard settings.

Also, the possibility of having more than one Crisis at the same time. You're already going in this direction, so don't hold back now - go all the way.
 
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Difficulty Adjusted AI Modifiers sounds really good. Does it also help with the late game bottleneck, where the AI runs out of naval capacity by increasing the naval cap they get from techs and naval cap modifiers in general? Or does it mean, that not only the economic modifiers, but also the weapon modifiers adjust according to the difficulty? A doubling fleet firepower certainly, because the AI gets double the output of its weapon tech for example.

We already have AI overflowing with ressources, which it cannot put into bigger fleets with grand admiral, Difficulty adjusted AI modfiers will enable the ai to reach the naval bottleneck sooner, but I fear it wont help in prolonging the gametime, before it gets either boring or the galaxy is conquered.
Just staying alive long enough until you can outfleet the AI shouldnt be a save victory. Thats why I am curious, if only economic modifiers get affected or the rest too.
 
Rather than being a simple toggle, Scaling Difficulty can now be set to Off, Mid Game, or Late Game
Click to expand...
Any chance we could also get a "starting difficulty" option if we enable scaling difficulty? I enjoy the scaling difficulty to help them keep up late game without being overwhelming early game, but zero modifiers often ends up making the early game a bit too easy, so being able to start them higher than zero would be great.
 
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Eladrin said:
Necroids:
View attachment 868127
There’s a Zombie on my Lawn - As a Necroid empire, eradicate a Plantoid empire, or vice-versa, without blowing up their final planet.
Click to expand...

For me it's not a huge deal but could you allow this to be completed also with Fungoid Empires, so that it doesn't require two Species pack? It will also stay on flavour with the reference since in the night levels of Plants vs Zombies you use Mushrooms/Fungi instead of plants.
 
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Can we get a “starting difficulty” for scaling difficulty? So that rather than scaling from 0 bonuses, the AI starts with some and scales from there up to the chosen maximum difficulty?
 
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