Stellaris Dev Diary #374 - Announcing the 3.99.0 "Phoenix" Open Beta

[NDCBAXTER0]

If this is the place to post bugs found so far

Habitats crash the game if you change a district type IE was trying to change from zero g research to Astro Mining bay(if important Fortress Station, will test a new save using commands and other habitats), this crash so far is consistent... so far actually like the new world system, and runs ALOT cleaner with high pops on my machine (tested using console commands to stress test)

 

[Tisifoni12]

It may help when they tidy up the UI. There's space for three zones where the early industry thing is, it is less than obvious that additional zones can be added down by the generator (+ in a circle), mining znd agriculture districts, with the click areas for modifying or adding districts at the top of the district boxes.

 

[Ikael]

The fact your consumer goods, science, unity, and alloy jobs are all bound to a single district depending on what zones you built makes balancing your production to your upkeep a nightmare. These resources should not all share the same construction pool.

See, this is the most worrying thing about the beta for me. The rest of the problems are clearly meant to be debugged and rebalanced at some point, but this seems intentional.

As to how it could be solved, I think that there would be several options:

Option a) Make Empire capital zones that grant you all the jobs/resources you need (say, make them so each urban district on your homeworld generates a bit of researcher, artisan, metallurgist, enforcer, & politician jobs). Perhaps capital designations would change the proportion of those jobs. That would be a clunky band-aid intended to work only for the very early game and single-planet builds. The moment you fund your first colony, you will start to get an imbalanced economy in need of new planets and constant expansion to keep it in check. The incentive for going giga-wide would stay in place, but at least you won't fall into early-game death spirals as easily as before.

Option b) Create a fourth type of district. You would have mining, agricultural, generator, urban (science & unity), and industrial (consumer goods & alloys, perhaps one might roll trade into it too) districts. It won't exactly solve 100% of the problem, but it would help mitigate it a bit.

Option c) Come back to the old planet management system of yore. Perhaps it could be a temporal stopgap measure so people can test all the other changes of the beta with a bit more leniency.

Option d) Try to come up with an entirely 100% different planet-building system from the ground up. Hardest option of them all, but it might be just what this brave new incarnation of Stellaris needs, rather than trying to fit a cube into a rounded hole.

 

[The Founder]

If this is the place to post bugs found so far

Habitats crash the game if you change a district type IE was trying to change from zero g research to Astro Mining bay(if important Fortress Station, will test a new save using commands and other habitats), this crash so far is consistent... so far actually like the new world system, and runs ALOT cleaner with high pops on my machine (tested using console commands to stress test)

They made it clear that habitats are not supported in this build:

Stellaris Dev Diary #374 - Announcing the 3.99.0 "Phoenix" Open Beta

Surprise! An early Stellaris Dev Diary! Last week I mentioned that on Friday we’d evaluate the current build, and I’d see if I could provide a timeline for the Open Beta. Things have been progressing well, so we’ve decided to put a very early...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

Option a) Make Empire capital zones that grant you all the jobs/resources you need (say, make them so each urban district on your homeworld generates a bit of researcher, artisan, metallurgist, enforcer, & politician jobs). Perhaps capital designations would change the proportion of those jobs. That would be a clunky band-aid intended to work only for the very early game and single-planet builds.

Making the empire capital zone special, in that it adds all jobs needed for an upstart empire, would not be very different from the base incomes all empires currently get. The two features could perhaps even be merged.

 

[Newbee53]

Making the empire capital zone special, in that it adds all jobs needed for an upstart empire, would not be very different from the base incomes all empires currently get. The two features could perhaps even be merged.

actually, this might be a really good idea if taken a bit further. Each government type could provide a thematic bonus to their capital world. with designations further refining it. And maybe even a special bonus from certain origins to help deal with one planet issues.

Gai world at least could use some bonus jobs to keep itself afloat until you've got the ability to terraform gai planets. And it wouldn't be hard to imagine some bonus to broken shackles. 'Climate Control Adaptationists' that produce amenities or something to flavor them having all those different aliens needing different environments to live in.

Not the best solution, but certainly has a lot of potential.

 

[Ikael]

Having authorities and even civics modify a bit the jobs provided by capital designations would be dope indeed.

And yeah, capitals being the only "jack of all trades" planets could work as a way to avoid falling into economic collapse at the game start. I don't think that it alone would be enough, for the current planet development system presents lots of other problems, but it is still a good first step, I believe.

Additionally, another poster also gave one suggestion that I quite liked: using planet designations/ascensions to fine-tune jobs provided by urban districts, so developing planets would become more flexible.

So rather than giving you, say, a "+5% alloys" you could get a "forge world" ascension that would add metallurgist jobs to all your city districts (or unlock unique districts / zones / buildings, even!).

It could work in order to differentiate planets and in order to make them more self-sustainable without killing the whole "4 tab districts" new planet management idea (plus it would help integrate planetary ascensions and unity builds better into the game).

 

[Calvax]

Making the empire capital zone special, in that it adds all jobs needed for an upstart empire, would not be very different from the base incomes all empires currently get. The two features could perhaps even be merged.

While this would help the game start I wouldn’t want the capital planet to be the only one capable of being self sufficient. Immersion wise it wouldn’t make a lot of sense, particularly if the capital is changed or other capitals are conquered. And while it might not be meta I feel something is lost if it becomes impossible to make a world that couldn’t stand on its own feet and rebuild an interstellar empire if it had to.

For all the concerns that 4.0 would make specialisation obsolete in my experience it’s mostly done the opposite. We still specialise our worlds but now it’s much harder to make a functioning jack-of-all-trades.

 

[Mole204]

It's clear that the city menus needs some cleaning up. There needs to be more ability to create the things the civilization needs, like unity points and consumer goods. Autochilton buildings and toaster factories (con goods) are needed more than the program lets on. The lack of flexibility in building on "government zone" and zone things are too limiting. Making an empire be stuck until it withers away is not the goal of (I'm guessing most of) the players. That is one of the reasons that modpacks get made- to fix things. And a clearer way to find the "empire focus" to start bashing the GalMarket together, especially for those with the DLC that has functions that rely on the GalMarket.
These parts of the game are supposed to be simply and to run smoothly. It's the dangers that the player puts himself into that are his problems. NOT mistaken attempts to change the difficulty of the city menus.

 

[vulcan7200]

See, this is the most worrying thing about the beta for me. The rest of the problems are clearly meant to be debugged and rebalanced at some point, but this seems intentional.

As to how it could be solved, I think that there would be several options:

Option a) Make Empire capital zones that grant you all the jobs/resources you need (say, make them so each urban district on your homeworld generates a bit of researcher, artisan, metallurgist, enforcer, & politician jobs). Perhaps capital designations would change the proportion of those jobs. That would be a clunky band-aid intended to work only for the very early game and single-planet builds. The moment you fund your first colony, you will start to get an imbalanced economy in need of new planets and constant expansion to keep it in check. The incentive for going giga-wide would stay in place, but at least you won't fall into early-game death spirals as easily as before.

Option b) Create a fourth type of district. You would have mining, agricultural, generator, urban (science & unity), and industrial (consumer goods & alloys, perhaps one might roll trade into it too) districts. It won't exactly solve 100% of the problem, but it would help mitigate it a bit.

Option c) Come back to the old planet management system of yore. Perhaps it could be a temporal stopgap measure so people can test all the other changes of the beta with a bit more leniency.

Option d) Try to come up with an entirely 100% different planet-building system from the ground up. Hardest option of them all, but it might be just what this brave new incarnation of Stellaris needs, rather than trying to fit a cube into a rounded hole.

I'm incredibly worried about 4.0. All of the bug fixes in the world won't change the fact that the base system as it's currently being implemented does not work, and is honestly not that fun. I'm afraid the Devs will see complaints about the system as "haters" but I've been playing Stellaris since release, and have just shy of 1,600 hours in the game. That's way more than any game I've ever played. I love this game. I even love some of the basic ideas of the system, customizing your Districts on a more macro level. They simply didn't take the system far enough imo. Zones should add jobs to the District, and then Buildings should change some of those jobs (For stuff like Holotheaters, Luxurious Housing, Precincts, Forts, ect instead of being flat bonuses), or add passive buffs (More workforce, workforce producing more, ect) like we're seeing now.

As it stands now, you have so much less control over the planet than you used to that the game becomes boring to play (in my opinion) on top of barely functioning. You have too many Resources to juggle to justify only 3 Zones (I don't count the Basic Resource Districts at the moment) per planet trying to produce everything you need. Opening up more of the buildings to be built in any District, and having them change jobs that the Zone is giving you, would make your building slots feel impactful (Scaling jobs feels better than flat bonuses I think) and give you a reason to have an Energy, Mining, Farming District on every planet so you can change out some of those jobs via the building slots they provide.

I really do hope the Devs listen to the criticisms of the system and not just the bug reports for this Open Beta so they don't make a massive mistake in implementing a system that is much worse than what we currently have in game.

 

[Vogan2]

After reading coments, playing few games (only this Starter Pack DLCs) and rereading dev diaries and comments again I probably understand why new districts/zones/buildings systems feels more restricted.

Currently we have three layers of planetary management:
1. We have basic resources districts, which produce resource "from void" (they use pops, but all jobs use pops, so I'll put that part out of brackets for now). Planetary management are simpliest "Build or not build, and how many". Most of the time you have 3-axis solution space, with additional "natural" limitations by features.
2. We have industrial districts, which convert basic resources and convert them into global empire-wide advanced resources (CG for development, make all part of economy work and other "inside", Alloys for expand and all that "outside"), and City districts, which provides local planetary-unique resources (building slots, housing and amenities, last one are slightly different, cause it has many non-planet sources). Planetary management for them are few harder, since you limited only by planet size, you should decide how many building slots you need and how many empire-wide CG/Alloys you want to produce. (and you always can switch between alloys and cg pressing one free button). Solution space are basically 2-axis here.
3. We have building slots taken by buildings, which split into two different subgroups:
a. Planetary-unique buildings, who basically provide planetary-wide buffs to production or scaled with anything else. (I include empire-unique buildings here, as they do the same but for entire empire)
b. Spammable buildings, which convert advanced resources (mostly CG) to abstract and strategic resources. Strategic resources (gas, crystals and motes) work as gatekeepers for upgrades (you need generate them properly to support more productive things, like upgraded weapon, buildings and more), and abstract resources are for global progression, science, unity and influence.
Planetary managment for both have hard limit for 12, so need to decide that buildings you want here. With capital building our options reduce to 11, but still that much.
(I ignore endgame resources since they aren't spammable until some specific civics or ascensions)

With Open Beta changes, first layer are still same, but second and third reduced hardly. Now on districts layer we merged city and industrial districts into one, so there is no actual decision - you just spam cities, and for additional expansion you sacrifice opportunities to add basic districts instead. Subgroups of building are splitted now -- spammable variants (unity, science, soldiers, e.t.c.) become Zones, which is basically binded to City, convert it into Science/Unity/Soldier/etc districts in terms of old system.
Planetary-unique buildings still same, but now they are splitted between zones, so each zone has actually less decisions too. And you limited by three zones at maximum, and until some Planetary Unification tech you actually limited by two. On colonies it`s even harder, cause you limited by one in each colony until some tech.
With that, you cannot make "half-unity-half-research" zone, you must chose one and spam it - and where is only three slots for that.

And problem become harder then it comes to three or less planets to function -- okay, you can provide basic resources from their own districts, and with their own zones you have a place to put some strategic resource production -- but then you have one capital zone and three options -- and you need produce CG, Alloy, Science, Unity, Amenities, Housing and at least some criminal suppression from that. Okay, amenities, housing and criminal suppression can work from Capital zone (but it hard, cause most building for that not scaled with planet size), but now you have three zones for four resources - and it becomes very fragile system where you have to juggle zones to keep from falling into a death spiral.

So, basically solutions space reduced from ~15 to, like, 4, and that`s very tight pants to wear.

Two suggestions:
1. Make Precinct Houses and Luxury Residences scaled with City Districts size.
2. Deeply thinks which zones can and should exists. Remember but most of the time it`s only two options per planet and three if it`s capital, so locking artists behind their own zone will make constant trouble. Maybe some mix or universal zones, which provide several different jobs? Or tweak buildings, so they will modify that jobs provided by districts rather than zones itself?

 

[Tisifoni12]

You can have 7 zones per planet, eventually ! Yes 7 !

There's the Government Zone (in the housing districts)
There's the box with three zones and your home world comes with the 'early industry' thing
There are three further zones that can be created, one in each of the energy, mining and agriculture districts

The UI can be improved to make this clearer perhaps and how you add, replace, etc.

There are no buildings that obviously provide unity at present other than the oddly named Autochthon monument (I get the concept, but the name has always seemed weird). I suspect other buildings may be added representing cultural institutions / monuments; museums, monuments, monasteries, etc.
Unity zone obviously helps, but there aren't any buildings to boost except the oddly named Autochthon monument which goes in the Government zone.

Something triggers 'Scum and Villainy' (crime and disorder) and I think that's either scrapping the early industry zone / building.
I think it's necessary to put something in place to replace it pretty quickly, even in advance, that will provide amenities.
Difficult to keep a roster of 6 Leaders unless you regularly dismiss the expensive ones in the early game.

 

[Tseudonym]

the oddly named Autochthon monument

It literally means "self ground". So unless it builds its own foundation, the name makes no sense semantically.

 

[joe876]

It’s hard to give any feedback right now really but based on what I’ve played:

The districts > zones > buildings feels like a step back in player experience. Feels like a lot of choice was removed and the scaling of jobs and how that’s expressed is lost. It used to be a simple + 2 jobs and +2/5 housing but now everything is so heavily depended on city districts with so little control over what jobs are actually being built. A small part of this is due to how much of an alpha this test is but still. Not to mention that basic resources getting districts feels pointless, it’s a none choice right now. A lot of this is till being worked on but I’m not sure if simply more districts or minor easing of building restrictions would make it much better.

Maybe being able to select which zone gets a city district and remove the limit on zones, or at least have an administrative capacity tied to it. That would introduce some choice. If I can build 10 city districts and I want 4 zones but I can build more if I wanted (alloy, consumer, unity and research) I can have 3 city to alloy zone, 4 to consumer zone, 2 to unity and 1 to research. Buildings can still buff or tweak the jobs accordingly. In the same way as now mining jobs add to the mining/agri/energy zone and buildings buff / alter it currently.

I’m not sure what to do with basic resource districts to make them not feel left out. After a while energy and mining districts will be deconstructed anyway, using kilo and megastructures and food coming from starbases or domesticated space fauna now or trade.

Maybe unique origins and civics can have other districts then fill the role of city districts like anglers and subterranean.

I’m also not sure what role planetary ascension now plays with zones / buildings. Feels like the mechanic should just role into zones from a thematic view.

It’s hard to say but it feels restrictive and clunky from a user experience and general management feel. I like having far more control over jobs now, but what happens when a zone is deconstructed? All those jobs at once become unemployed?

This is early but I’m also not a fan of the current UI, just overall layout. Management has nothing to offer, it’s arguably less useful than the army tab right now (I know it’s early but still), and a lot of the menus feel like a lot of empty space.

Timeline is okay I guess, I like the design
Visually, and the process to get ahead is fine, but static resource targets aren’t a good metric, getting a monthly income of X is a better metric for a lot of these if the intention is to steer new players.

Like a lot of the smaller changes.

 

[roths_]

Hello, fairly long time player but first time poster. I've been tinkering around with trying to make a meta build for the open beta as a thought exercise and I've got some early impressions.

1. With the zone system the way it is, anglers is undeniably very very powerful since you basically gain the ability to make consumer goods quite competitively without having to devote some of your limited city zones to consumer goods specifically, along with the obvious benefits associated with being able to generate some passive trade. Can't really compare it to everything else though since so much is unimplemented.

I don't know if catalytic processing is good though, while I'm able to use domestic planetary production to reduce imports and juice up my trade revenue I have so many surplus minerals from the few mining stations I have even without any mining jobs that it seems like they'd go to waste otherwise, but at the same time what am I going to do with the food from my starbases? In general it seems really easy to pile up way too many basic resources due to how developing more alloy/cg/unity/etc production capacity seems to be bottlenecked. I guess I might buy at least one of each basic resource district for the zone building slots anyways but that seems very gamey, also am not a huge fan of the way rare resources seem to be tied to the basic ones too either ngl but I suppose that could be tweaked.

Frankly I think a bunch of the starbase resource generating buildings like solar panels or hydroponics are overdue for nerfing and 4.0 is as good a time as any to get it done.

2. The early industrial building you get that gives you jobs in exchange for -50% researcher efficiency is awful and I don't think its intuitive to have players basically have to rush to tear down their infrastructure asap to be competitive. Granted I am a little weird in that I start out with an abundance of cg and a food deficit for my build but still. From the sounds of things a lot of people seem like they immediately have to do economic crisis management at game start. I myself really wish that favoriting jobs actually worked, manually deallocating workforce is a pain.

3. I basically ignored amenities (aside from using a slot for luxury housing) and crime completely with crime lord deal and I didn't seem to have any issues with stability? That might be because I'm running authoritarian stratified economy or something though. If amenities are actually required to maintain stability for other build types that seems like a potential issue for balance. At the same time having a whole dedicated zone for it seems massively overkill and I'd rather just shove more workforce into more productive sectors and take what seems to be a negligible stability hit.

4. UI definitely needs a lot of work, it was difficult for me to figure out how to replace the early industrial zone, there's no easy way to tell the expected economic output of a job per 100 workforce units or something else standardized, I don't even know where to find pop growth, and etc. I feel like the build tab should just be present by default rather than being tucked away personally but that's a minor nitpick.

5. If trade overflow is supposed to convert into resources based on your policy at a one to one ratio that definitely doesn't seem to be working on my end when I tested it. Also for things like trade purchase overflow limits that cause prices to go up or down I think it'd be good to include some sort of UI element that tells players where the limits are set.

6. I really don't like the timeline system, maybe have it as an optional tutorial thing as a framework but if the goals in that reward guaranteed techs for being researched that is going to be abused SO hard for tech rushes. As is I was still able to tech rush swarm missile cruisers at a reasonable timeframe, albeit with less alloys than I would normally have, and that's with me ignoring the timeline. I dread to see what other more dedicated folks could do to abuse that.

Here's some pics:

I didn't really bother with trying to maintain the full leader council since my leaders die so fast (running overtuned origin with pre-planned growth & fanatic xenophobe, and I use imperial governance for the free replacement leaders that heirs give you plus the 10% bonus capital resources seems useful for tall builds). I haven't tested military conflict yet but frankly with how much in alpha things seem to be I don't know if that would work at all, so much stuff seems not even testable. Current state of the game seems to favor stacking pop growth and pop assembly asap in order to unlock zones on planets as quickly as possible.

I'm pretty sure slavery hasn't been implemented since when I tried to adopt slaver guilds it didn't really show on the pop management page. Honestly just in general so many civics have to be completely and utterly reworked to the point it almost seems like paradox would be better off releasing a sequel rather than trying to radically change the game so much. I like what paradox seems to be trying to go for in theory to stop snowballing from being as big of an issue as it is, but there's a lot of game design work to be done to rebalance and reimplement EVERYTHING to the point its even testable. If someone can point me to a list of officially supported civics and such to test that would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Tisifoni12]

Instead of the Autochthon Monument perhaps Cultural or Heritage sector.

I am finding it easier to use the planetary interface now I by trial and error understand it better. Using the drivers to adjust the amount in agriculture, factories, etc.

But it feels like micromanagement rather than strategy and like a game of population management rather than exploration, civilization building and interstellar conflict.

Something in there, I suspect demolition of the early industries triggers Scum and Villainy which seems capable of drowning your civilization in crime. Some advice on how to avoid / mitigate that would be good. Maybe don't do it until you can add that additional zone and have a plan to add amenities or so e such.

Also think the Timeline feature might be useful for new players, but for those who've been with Stellaris for a while it seems like an unnecessary commentary. I just go 'oh look, that's moderately interesting'.

 

[V-Metamorph]

And invading does not work

just bombard it.

 

[The Founder]

There are no buildings that obviously provide unity at present other than the oddly named Autochthon monument (I get the concept, but the name has always seemed weird). I suspect other buildings may be added representing cultural institutions / monuments; museums, monuments, monasteries, etc.
Unity zone obviously helps, but there aren't any buildings to boost except the oddly named Autochthon monument which goes in the Government zone.

The Unity workers are Bureaucrats and they have a buff building.
Also, looks like 3.99.02 is out now.

 

[Tisifoni12]

The Unity workers are Bureaucrats and they have a buff building.

Which didn't seem to be evident from the info box, but perhaps that will be edited.

 

[HypoDis]

And invading does not work

Having the same problem here.

Couldn't liberate a planet that they had taken from me in an earlier war, nor can I take their capital on a broken ringworld origin. The enemy is a hive species, if that is important. Have noted that ringworlds aren't working from the dev notes.

Is there any chance of disabling deeply broken features (like ringworlds) so we can get as far into the game as possible?

Cheers!