Stellaris Dev Diary #373 - 4.0 Development Progress Update

[Cosmic Fishering Fleet]

Game mechanics are only optional to people who don't care about playing as well as possible.

To serious players, these focuses will become a mandatory, obnoxious checklist of tasks you have to go out of your way to do even though they don't align with any kind of logical plan for your empire or the way you want to play. It's like the Eurekas in Civ 6. They turn the game from a sandboxy historical simulator into an endless series of nonsensical sidequests.

It's obvious how this will turn out - instead of playing organically, every skilled player will be, for example, pushing out 10 useless naked minimum cost Destroyers asap in order to unlock the Cruisers tech much earlier than intended and then roll over everything. Don't get the build 10 destroyers focus card? Spend all your unity to reroll until you get it. Does this sound like the Stellaris we enjoy?

A lot of people just dismiss the complaints about this feature because they either don't play the game seriously or just don't consider the ramifications. It's always like this with bad new features in the game - every newly announced feature gets cheered by the majority here on the forums while a small minority sees the problems coming but is ignored. Then the new feature releases and NOW everyone starts complaining after seeing it in action, when it's too late.

The point of a game is recreation. If you aren't having fun in the game, you should give it a rest and try some other game. Then return to this game and try to find new meta.

 

[Bad4play]

Hello everyone!

We’re still hard at work getting the features we’ve been describing into the game, but this week we’re giving you a bit of a progress update, and I’ll be giving my thoughts on what shape they’ll be in when we begin the Open Beta. As with everything over the past couple of months, all of this is still subject to change.

We’ve successfully gotten past the critical milestone of “the game is no longer completely broken”, and things are starting to come together very nicely.

DD #367: Precursor Selection, Databank, Species Modification, and Ship Designer​

The first three are fully functional and will be in the Open Beta.

The Databank still has some placeholder graphics on some buttons, and we’re planning on adding more entries, but it’s good enough for the Open Beta.

View attachment 1261128​

The work for the Ship Designer changes was done in the Q2 DLC branch to support that release, and while it is functional it will not be in the Open Beta (but will be in the final release).

DD #368: Pacing Adjustments, Galaxy Generation, Leader Traits, Events/Messages/Notifications, Empire Focuses and the Timeline, Hard Reset, and Achievements​

Wow, we covered a lot in that dev diary.

All of these are functional, but like the Ship Designer, Hard Reset is in a different branch and will not be present in the Open Beta (but will be in the final release).

The Timeline shows a number of important milestones, and is generally functional. There’s still some polish to be done here, but I feel like it’s in a good enough state for the Open Beta.

View attachment 1261129​

Many of the basic Focus Tasks are in too, along with some of the progression rewards for completing them. We’ve added a couple of new Technologies to use as awards, such as Existential Campaigns, a tier 5 Society Tech.

Still to-do are Tasks for nonstandard gamestyles, and we haven’t moved things like Form Federation out of the Diplomatic Traditions yet.

Currently almost all of the Focuses relate to the base game only, but it’s good enough for now. We will have more in the actual 4.0 release.

Achievements no longer require Ironman, but the use of any debug commands disables them for that run. We haven’t updated them to the new systems yet though, so getting things like 100 pops on a planet is trivially easy.

View attachment 1261130View attachment 1261131
Well that was easy.
​

DD #369: Trade and Logistics, Mammalian Portraits​

Most, but not all, of the features described in dev diary #369 are in a functional state. Trade is a normal resource that is shown in the top bar. There’s Logistical upkeep on ships and for local planetary deficits, and it has replaced energy as the market resource.

View attachment 1261132View attachment 1261133​

We have not yet completed the entire trade economy for Gestalts, but they will have some baseline generation to handle this from their Maintenance Drones for the Open Beta.

Our mammalian friends are done, but like Hard Reset, are in their own development branch and will not be present in the Open Beta.

DD #370: Pop Groups and Workforce, Colonization, and Civilians​

This is the core of what we’re interested in testing during the Open Beta.

Pops have been converted to using the new Pop Group system, and most aspects of Workforce are functional. We’re still going through the various jobs and updating them, and some of the weirder stuff in Stellaris (like, for example, Permanent Unemployment) hasn’t been worked on yet. Broken Shackles is hilariously broken right now. (It’s in the name, after all.)

Multispecies pop growth is working, but we haven’t made Xenocompatibility pool different species together yet.

View attachment 1261134
Simultaneous pop growth!​

Your homeworld starts with an extra 2000 pops, most of whom start as Civilians. This number is subject to change based on our internal playtesting and the Open Beta.

DD #371: Planet UI & Zones, Surface UI, Ecumenopoli, and Habitats​

This is the other big part we’re still working on. The backend for the new mechanics is mostly complete, but we’re still doing the design side implementation of the new jobs, zones, and buildings.

The actual surface UI is still very much a work in progress - it’s getting to a functional state, but isn’t near the polish level of the designs you saw in the dev diary. It’s likely to be part of the way there (but not complete) at the start of the Open Beta.

Special planet types like Habitats and Ecumenopoli are unlikely to be fully implemented for at least the first part of the Open Beta. We have completed tying Habitat maximum development directly to the sizes of the deposits in the system, but haven’t had a chance to recreate their districts or zones using the new systems yet.

Performance​

In a couple of threads, I mentioned that we’re not yet taking full advantage of some of the new model's performance benefits. Many things are still being calculated daily rather than monthly and are still largely single-threaded. We plan to keep it that way for the first couple of patches of the Open Beta because it will make it significantly easier for us to spot and fix any major issues that crop up.

As a reminder, the 3.11 Technology Open Beta found an issue like that with the Breakthrough Technologies, and finding these sorts of fundamental problems is my primary desire for the Open Beta. The Stellaris community is pretty exceptional at providing general feedback with the information provided by dev diaries, but a week of Open Beta testing will hammer the systems harder than we could do with months of internal testing.

So WHEN is it? What’s Next?​

I can’t quite tell you that right now. This Friday, we’ll be evaluating the status of our current build, and I’ll try to provide a possible timeline for sometime next week.

Until then, it’s back to the code mines for us! See you next week!

Maybe this was asked before and I missed it but how will the pop rework affect mods that create new jobs (as a example)? Will the updating need only a few lines to be corrected or is it a major change for the modding community (a needed one tho !)

 

[Newbee53]

I strongly suspect certain rewards will play out like the Civ 6 breakthrough system where it becomes gamey trying to collect bonuses that they would have otherwise obtained later, but you're right that we should wait for the beta to see how it plays out in practice. I think this will be the breakthrough technologies of this beta - good intentions, undesirable side-effects - but we really just don't have a lot of information about the actual goals, progression pace, and rewards.

I like break throughs, because by the second game I only tried for the breakthroughs when I wanted the random tech or was close anyways. I don't see the problem here.

This. What I really worry about is the ease of guaranteed ramp up in military power by pursuing the military path: getting to cruisers early and guaranteed is a huge power boost. I'm really leary of this system, and would hope it could be made opt in/out at game creation.

I'd imagine that ease of military conquest by pushing the military path would in fact be a balance issue, more than a kill it enterally issue. I suspect opting out of it would be pretty difficult to set up. Though maybe not. It's one of the settings I'd probably not ever touch if made.

Yeah, my hypothesis is groups of 1000 would be easier to grok than groups of 100, and I've already seen a number of people confused about the pop numbers on the reddit version of this DD. You can still do percentages based off of kilopops, your percentages just have a decimal value, e.g. 12.5%.

The more I think about this the less I agree. 100 of something is easier to think of, 1000 is a bit harder. Personally, I hope it stays as a base of 100, but gets automatically shortened once it breaks over something like 3k or 5k. or whatever works best. Groups of 100 don't need percentage sign to be thought of as 56/100 jobs is automatically 56%, it requires no change to make things work. Even if you aren't thinking as a percentage, it is just easier to understand.

 

[Critical Ethics]

every skilled player will be, for example, pushing out 10 useless naked minimum cost Destroyers asap in order to unlock the Cruisers tech much earlier than intended

Just to make sure we're all on the same page: Building 10 useless naked minimum cost destroyers will not directly unlock Cruisers. Completing Conquest focuses grants you progress in the Conquest track, and at a point on the Conquest track you will gain cruisers as a guaranteed tech option with 0% progress. I'm just checking because people keep getting this wrong. If you've just misunderstood how it works then cool, no harm no foul.

If your complaint was made with full awareness of how the system is intended to work:
1) Talking about unlocking cruisers "before they're intended" is hilarious in a game with a random weight based tech draw. According to the weighting system the "intended" time for cruisers to be unlocked is not before 2220, then increasing in odds between 2230 and 2040, and then 10x again if your neighbours get them at any point. So "before they're intended" means before 2220, which is a pretty low bar to clear! If they manage to screw it up that badly even after a stress test beta then I'll happily livestock purge that crow.
2) According to the previous dev diary It's actually 20 destroyers.
3) How are you going to speed down the conquest tree to fast unlock cruisers if you're throwing away alloys on 20 naked destroyers? You should probably just build 20 regular destroyers and then go use them to fight people to finish the other conquest tasks faster. At which point the system is working exactly as intended.

Like has been said, the specific tasks and whether they're weirdly gameable is going to be a big decider in how well this works, and if there's a rakeload of dumb makework in there I will be first in line shaking my fist about it. But building 20 naked destroyers to unlock cruisers too fast... they'd have to mess up the core concept real bad for that to be an option.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

2) According to the previous dev diary It's actually 20 destroyers.

At least for me, 20 destroyers is usually part of my "lets go bully the space fauna" period, once I've started to feel limited by their presence.
*Maybe* jumping on a weak neighbour who has accidentally lost most of their fleet to an ill advised or unlucky fight with space stuff.

It hardly feels like a burden to build a few destroyers *naturally* in my playthrough (It'll probably effectively be two fleets of 10/20 frigates and 10 destroyers, since it's an early game template that works *acceptably* for trash clearance.

 

[Cry_Havok]

Will the rework to pops and starting conditions fix the fact that multiple civics and origins start in a CG death spiral that can only barely be averted (Employee ownership megacorps most come to mind, but I know there are others)

 

[Critical Ethics]

At least for me, 20 destroyers is usually part of my "lets go bully the space fauna" period, once I've started to feel limited by their presence.
*Maybe* jumping on a weak neighbour who has accidentally lost most of their fleet to an ill advised or unlucky fight with space stuff.

It hardly feels like a burden to build a few destroyers *naturally* in my playthrough (It'll probably effectively be two fleets of 10/20 frigates and 10 destroyers, since it's an early game template that works *acceptably* for trash clearance.

Yup, that's the other reason it's a non issue. It's a trivial amount to build if you're just playing the game so the idea of building 20 (or even 10) naked destroyers to game the system is the opposite of efficient. That's what made the scientist one from earlier stand out; it's the only one of everything that's been teased that's even vaguely "Just do it for the points", and even then that would only be if the game can potentially throw it at you while you're still in the exploration phase.

 

[grommile]

Apparently "but you can already cheat with 3rd party programms" is the best argument they have?

Our other argument is:

One might reasonably expect, if the "relaxing the rules will dilute achievements" side have a credible case for the devs to answer, that there would be a significant completion rate of the hardest or most exotic achievements in Paradox titles that allow modded non-ironman play to award achievements.

Based on that expectation, let's look at Vicky 3 or (since patch 1.9) CK3's achievement completion rates, where it is already the case that modded, non-ironman play is allowed to award achievements.

In both cases, the rarest achievements have a displayed completion rate on Steam Global Achievements stats of 0.1%.

So while in theory, yes, people can use SAM for any Paradox title, or EZ Cheevos mods for Vicky 3 or CK3, to get achievements trivially... the number of people willing to do this is essentially meaningless compared to the overall size of the playerbase.

 

[Alexandre]

DD #370: Pop Groups and Workforce, Colonization, and Civilians
This is the core of what we’re interested in testing during the Open Beta.

I've been thinking about this a bit, and I want to make a suggestion. Civilians isn't the correct name for a strata of society - in English, it means non-military. What would make more sense is to use an economic designation instead. Having mulled this over a few days, I think the best solution would be to change the name for workers to "Skilled Workers", rename Civilians "Semi-Skilled Workers", and that leaves the last class "Unskilled Workers" to be used more creatively in the future, where it could reference pops subjected to stellar shock, or bio trophies, or the servant class.

Otherwise, I'm really excited by the direction you are moving the game, and can't wait till the Open Beta is released.

-Alexandre-

 

[Ajacoba]

I've been thinking about this a bit, and I want to make a suggestion. Civilians isn't the correct name for a strata of society - in English, it means non-military. What would make more sense is to use an economic designation instead. Having mulled this over a few days, I think the best solution would be to change the name for workers to "Skilled Workers", rename Civilians "Semi-Skilled Workers", and that leaves the last class "Unskilled Workers" to be used more creatively in the future, where it could reference pops subjected to stellar shock, or bio trophies, or the servant class.

Otherwise, I'm really excited by the direction you are moving the game, and can't wait till the Open Beta is released.

-Alexandre-

But as was already said, civilians aren't unskilled nor semi-skilled
They just happen to currently not be working in any of the big jobs that have a direct impact on the economy and your government

 

[Newbee53]

I've been thinking about this a bit, and I want to make a suggestion. Civilians isn't the correct name for a strata of society - in English, it means non-military.

As an American, I've also seen it used in the 'not government' function every so often. It is far from common and probably not the best use for the word. Except I've not seen a better one.

I think the best solution would be to change the name for workers to "Skilled Workers", rename Civilians "Semi-Skilled Workers", and that leaves the last class "Unskilled Workers" to be used more creatively in the future, where it could reference pops subjected to stellar shock, or bio trophies, or the servant class.

you are using workers to often and its prone to cause problems with translations. Can't say I know a lot about this, except hyphenated compound words is at least a little unusual.

While civilian isn't good, it's still better than going with modifiers on worker. At least in my opinion. Still looking for a better word personally, but this is a problem I've seen a lot.

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

I still would prefer if the "Residents" stratum was instead called Ordinary Residents, Regular Residents or Common Residents, to avoid confusion with references to the entire group of pops with Residence citizenship. The "Civilians" stratum could then be named similarly, as Ordinary Citizens, Regular Citizens or Common Citizens.

Any of these names highlights that there is nothing special about these pops, i.e. that they have no special role or occupation, without really implying anything else about them. The meaning of "ordinary", "regular" or "common" depends entirely on the society they live in.

 

[jcklemme]

I would really like to see achievements be unlockable while playing with mods.

 

[R_BY_n_o Pulsar]

Hello. I have a request for you - is it possible to soften or remove the requirements for the portrait (I forgot how it is called in the English version, I play with the translation). The thing is that, well, probably every player would like to play for a machine empire with a portrait of human, and this is only the most banal. It is not clear why only mushrooms and vegetables can take a civilian model (?) for transformations of the ideal world by some kind of structure.

 

[ToadChild]

We actually did strongly consider them being 1000 rather than 100. "Kilopop" is better than "Hectopop", but bulk size 100 works better in parts of the UI and people often think in percentages.

Just from a consistency perspective, I think it's kind of weird that it says 32 pops in some places and 3200 pops in others. Purely based on that, I think it would be better if the sub-pops were presented as a fraction, so 32.00 Voor pops in this example.

 

[Ajacoba]

Just from a consistency perspective, I think it's kind of weird that it says 32 pops in some places and 3200 pops in others. Purely based on that, I think it would be better if the sub-pops were presented as a fraction, so 32.00 Voor pops in this example.

It's not gonna look like that in the end anyways
That's just an early build

 

[DevWolf]

I have a question about pop growth, does the amount of pops affect how much they grow per month? I saw the gif showing off simultaneous pop growth I noticed they both were growing by 2 each month, but then the top one increased by 3 in the last month.

 

[Tseudonym]

Yup, that's the other reason it's a non issue. It's a trivial amount to build if you're just playing the game so the idea of building 20 (or even 10) naked destroyers to game the system is the opposite of efficient. That's what made the scientist one from earlier stand out; it's the only one of everything that's been teased that's even vaguely "Just do it for the points", and even then that would only be if the game can potentially throw it at you while you're still in the exploration phase.

It also seems that most of the foci will be things you'll be doing anyway by simply playing the game, so it's less "you need to complete the tasks to play optimally" and more "by playing optimally, you will complete the tasks anyway".

 

[T5_k]

We actually did strongly consider them being 1000 rather than 100. "Kilopop" is better than "Hectopop", but bulk size 100 works better in parts of the UI and people often think in percentages.

... people often think ....

 

[Ikael]

Man, by the time I can play this game again, it is going to be something else entirely. Love it!

I also don't know why so much hate towards the focus system. The game already has a mission system (faction demands), and it does not railroad you because the rewards that it grants (unity) can be achieved through several other different means. I don't think that this will be any different. The focus system seems poised to become more of a very minor, easily skippable addition.I think that it has lots of (sadly) untapped potential, but it certainly won't become a major obstacle to enjoyment.

Also, I wish pops would be less granular, as strange as it sounds (say, 1 pop turning 10, rather than 100). Higher numbers at some point become hard to distinguish, but I guess I will have to try it out by myself and see how it feels.