Stellaris Dev Diary #383 - 4.0 has Released, What’s Next?

[Tommi414]

I hope that we will get Planetary UI overhaul before the summer break.
Between non-functional design and low-res assets (Zones icons look particularly bad) - I hope we will not be stuck with it for too long.

I especially hope they scratch the "Management" tab.

Bring blocker tiles and decisions back to the "Surface" tab and rename it to "Management". Current "Surface" tab without decisions, blocker tiles and it being named surface instead of "Management" makes it a 7/10.

Rename the "Management" tab to "Population". In the "Population" tab, add pie chart graphs that break down the population into its species, jobs and ideologies, much like in Victoria 3. Add a clear indicator showing total monthly pop growth, including births, emigration and immigration. Currently it's a 0/10, especially because of the useless pop list.

The "Economy" tab is also... the name is not fitting, and the overview of jobs bad. I give this a 5/10.

"Armies" and "Corporate" tab are whatever. Especially armies I feel like should be unrelated to planets. Not worthy of a mark.

But please, for the love of God, get rid of the current "Management" tab and the endless list of pop group boxes. I love this update, the new dynamic it brings to colonisation is awesome, but I just can't with this "Management" tab.

 

[Dragonsteel82]

It would be really great to have the number of civilians shown next to the unemployed or the number of available jobs. That would help to understand a planet at a glance.

 

[Tommi414]

I still fundamentally disagree with the design decision to reopen planet management so thoroughly. We have so many areas the community consistently asks for improvements on. Warfare, internal politics, and species management come to mind but there are others.

The AI might not have been perfect before but at least incremental changes would’ve been more likely to leave us with less of hot mess while still layering in performance improvements from work force, improving species management, and bringing bios up to match Machines again. (I’ll assume work force is an improvement and something else new is driving the performance issues.) The Stellaris team has been so receptive to (honestly negative) feedback before. Shame they weren’t this time and I really hope they’ll strongly reconsider changes when beta feedback suggests they should again the next time this happens.

As a long time player, this new pops and planetary management system is awesome. Even colonisation feels so much more rewarding now. Gives me great hope for how internal politics, war and diplomacy will be expanded. What's bad is it was released in this state. Completely unpolished, unfinished with terrible UI decisions (I'm on a crusade against the "Management" tab). This just gives me the feeling I should never buy the season pass again, until the game is polished.

 

[Thiend]

I'm encouraged by the willingness to admit to having made a mistake.

I would like to here note that it was a pretty big mistake, and there were blinders on somewhere if you didn't see it coming. I'm not saying this to berate you, but I AM saying you need to pay more attention to problems to make sure it doesn't happen again - if such a huge proportion of the beta testers, myself included, could say with confidence "this update has massive feature creep and needs to be pared down" before we even knew it was releasing 5/5 and not significantly later, it should have been very easy to see that setting that release date wasn't a good idea. You probably needed more internal testing, as many of these bugs are literally unavoidable by playtesting even a single time for ten minutes - there are technologies you can start with available to research that unlocked buildings with a build limit of 0, and such critical bugs as Deep Space Citadels and the Starlit Citadel just poinking out of existence upon being upgraded (haven't seen a note for that, incidentally, but that's not my point and people have made bug reports).

I have to assume at some point you knew this wasn't in a good state and knew it wouldn't be by release, and even if it was literally the night before you could have gotten a LOT of good will by just saying "it isn't in a good state, we know and apologize, we're going to keep working on it but we're going to re-launch into an open beta with Biogenesis unlocked for those who own it because we already promised this release date. Here's a feedback and bug report thread."

Purely as information, do you know when the summer break will be? Or is it even known yet? Knowing how long we have would help rather a lot.

I hadn't previously bought Biogenesis because I was simply not confident in the work being done to fix this in a reasonable timeframe. I have now, because if you're currently acknowledging the problem and have a planned timeframe to fix it in (timeframe pending, see above paragraph) it is my hope that by giving detailed feedback on bugs and design issues I can help to fix it faster. I'll make a thread with that latter part at some point, but there are already four obvious pieces of feedback I have, some of which I've given previously, so I'll list them now.

• Prioritize/deprioritize for jobs to greatly improve control, and prevent needing to close and reopen jobs either due to new issues or in general. Deprioritize would fill after all other jobs, prioritize would fill before all other jobs, neither would pull pops/workforce off or to them that already exist on the planet (pops that already have jobs would ignore the modifier, only new pops).
• Change city districts to be two distinct sets of city districts, which would make fine economic control possible again. Instead of splitting one city district as all or 50-50 between specializations, you would have two, meaning if one was all CG you could expand it without also expanding the research/unity split of the other district and increasing CG upkeep while trying to increase CG output, for example.
• Make maintenance drones a job again, just make it create some extremely excessive number of job slots. We can then close and prioritize them as normal, and no other changes are really needed to make it work. Making it the overflow job fits how it worked before, it just needs the controls of being a job back.
• Add Ascension Theory to the Focus system

 

[Sighfer]

Which patch will contain the promised optimizations? I have read that the devs on Discord said they are not in, yet.

 

[Masked Ermine]

Hello everyone!

We’re one day early with the dev diary this week, but I wanted to get this out to all of you as soon as possible.

The State of the Release​

The Stellaris 4.0 “Phoenix” update and BioGenesis have been released.

BioGenesis is a fantastic expansion and I’m incredibly proud of what we accomplished with it, but I have to be honest - like its namesake, the free patch alongside BioGenesis has been a little bit on fire.

During the lead-up to the release, I was confident that we would be able to finish the revamp and clean up the most critical bugs. We fell short of that goal, and we’re committed to continuing to fix things until the 4.0 release is in the state it needs to be in.

While some suggested delaying the release until the game was in better shape, I wanted to keep as much distance as we could from the summer holidays. I was concerned about repeating a 2.2-style situation, where we couldn't provide full post-launch support for the game and it remained broken for too long. Like the 2.2 changes, however, I strongly believe that the system changes in 4.0 improve Stellaris and will give us the platform we need to rise from those ashes and grow for years to come.

I’m incredibly thankful for the passion of our fans and apologize for disappointing you.

Hotfixes and Patches​

We’ve spent the week delivering fixes on a daily basis, starting with a same-day hotfix to take care of a crash found by the early access influencers:

Spoiler: Stellaris 4.0.2 Hotfix Patch Notes

Stellaris 4.0.2 Hotfix​

Stability​

• Fixed crash by preventing the deletion of a ship design that was only present in a build queue

Tuesday morning we fixed a number of the issues you raised, and started getting some performance fixes in:

Spoiler: Stellaris 4.0.3 Patch Notes

Stellaris 4.0.3 Patch​

Features​

• Monthly change in Biomass is now shown in the resource bar for Wilderness empires.

Bugfix​

• Fixed some building upgrades being unconstructable or appearing with Planet Cap: 0
• Devouring Wilderness now correctly generates biomass from eating pops
• You will no longer be tasked with making an agricultural district if you are a Wilderness Empire and an Orchard Forest if you are a regular empire.
• The timeline completion and progression popups no longer remain open when the timeline UI is reopened after being closed.
• Fixed shattered rings not showing generator districts
• Fixed some unity buildings being broken
• Fixed politicians having double the resource output they should
• Fixed the bullet points for various species traits
• Fixed empire size from district modifiers being applied twice
• Zookeepers no longer increase the amount of research that other Zookeeper produce scaling with the number of zookeepers. Oops!
• Fixed assembly specialization for machine worlds giving the wrong jobs
• Fixed the council position for worker coop providing the incorrect amount of amenities.
• Wilderness empires can no longer become the Behemoth, they are perfect the way they are.
• Fixed some localization issues with some planetary decisions (English only)
• Fixed some tooltips mentioning regular jobs for wilderness
• Fixed Wilderness colonization button
• Fixed the Avatar Forest's volatile mote upkeep being too high
• Fixed the Thermoclastic Roar using improper syntax for killing pops
• Fixed some biological offspring ships not calling the correct 3d models
• The Order's Demesne should now correctly be swapped for a standard Planetary Defense specialization
• Pre-FTL planets should once again have their buildings
• Wilderness Deposits have been contained and will no longer be spawning across the galaxy. (Fixes systems generating with no resources.)
• Fixed ai megacorps not having an influence budget to build branch office buildings with
• Fixed the tooltip that said how many traders you get from branch office buildings depending on civics (English only)
• Fixed space fauna gauss weapons dealing -100% hull damage
• Fixed biological ship point defense and flak being identical
• Fixed juggernaut fusion reactors being equippable on titans not juggernauts
• The Faculty of Archaeostudies no longer gives broken jobs
• Fixed a planetary deposit making gestalt physicist jobs require consumer goods
• Fixed budding pops making robot assembly plants sometimes stop working
• Empire with the catalytic processing civics now start with additional food districts
• The Catalytic Processing civic now says that Metallurgists are converted into Catalytic Technicians
• Fixed some trait tooltips overstating effects by a factor of 100 (English only)
• Ancient Clone Vats can now be built in any urban district specialization
• Added tooltip description for Wilderness Refining World.
• Virtuality no longer allows an infinite workforce loop
• The experimental ship from the War Fragment now scale
• The experimental ship from the War Fragment no longer drops debris
• You can no longer build the Wilderness Glade holding on unnatural worlds
• The Wilderness can no longer build multiple shield generators, effectively becoming immune to bombardment.
• Fixed numerous buildings sticking around after a Wilderness took over a planet.
• Fixed numerous event buildings not having a biomass cost for Wilderness
• Fixed the First League Filing Office not giving the unity jobs it should have to most empires.
• Physics, Society, and Engineering focused District Specializations now trigger flavor text selection for their District.
• Improved post game Behemoth Behavior
• Fixed biological ships not having logistic upkeep
• Fixed habitats spawning with a broken orbital
• Civilians are now generated with a mix of ethics
• Pops are now created with a randomly selected ethic when appropriate.
• The Ministry of Culture building now says that Bureaucrats are converted into Culture Workers
• The Core focus task "Establish a Branch Office" can now be completed
• Fixed Natural Neural Network maintenance drones
• Fixed Spanish Translation of Precinct Houses
• Fixed all rural districts being destroyed when losing a colony
• Fix to an unemployment tooltip
• Fix issue with colonization on planets, specifically seen on shattered rings

Balance​

• Logistic Drones now provide a small amount of amenities
• The Faculty of Archaeostudies now gives minor artifacts from biology/archaeo-engineer jobs if you have the Archaeoengineers AP
• Buffed Prosperity traditions
• Significantly buffed the scientist expertise traits
• Wilderness and Nascent Stage are now incompatible
• Nerfed spawning and assembly specializations for hive and machine worlds
• Rebalanced Natural Neural Network - reduced the research generated, but significantly reduced the additional upkeep
• Correctly put soldier job efficiency modifier on the Military Academy, not the Fortress
• The chance to get the cultist's flagship is now 20% instead of 100%
• Districts for Wilderness Empires now cost 50 Biomass
• The expand planet decision for Wilderness now costs 5×(Planet Size)^2 Biomass and 50 Influence
• Reduced the extra society research from zookeepers
• Civilian ethic outputs have been adjusted
• State Academy now has a planet cap of 3
• Betharian Districts now produce 2 Minerals and 6 Energy by default, rather than just Energy.

AI​

• Gave the AI a helper event so they don't leave their starting shattered ring segments uncolonised
• The AI now values buildings that modify production more.

Stability and Performance​

• Fixed a crash when exiting to main menu
• Found an issue with Weaver growth auras that was lagging the game:
  • The weaver growth auras temporarily affect all ships in the fleet instead of only biological ships capable of growth due to these performance issues, however they no longer apply an upkeep increase.
• Significantly improved how Biomass is calculated
• Improve loading time of late game saves

This morning we deployed the 4.0.4 patch, with fixes to some of the high profile bugs and changes focusing on balance, stability, and performance:

Spoiler: Stellaris 4.0.4 Patch Notes

Stellaris 4.0.4 Patch​

Balance​

• The default Eternal Vigilance policy will now only spawn defensive platforms in orbit of upgraded starbases
• Amenities Updates:
  • Logistics drones now produce additional amenities if Instinctive Synchronization is taken
  • Luxury Housing, Drone Storage, and Hive Warrens grant 1500 housing and 2500 amenities.
  • Paradise Domes, Upgraded Drone Storage, and Expanded Warrens grant 3000 housing and 5000 amenities.
  • Communal Housing grants 2000 housing and 3000 amenities.
  • Utopian Communal Housing grants 4000 housing and 6000 amenities.
  • 100 Entertainers now give 1250 Amenities instead of 1000.
  • The Entertainment Forum is again an upgrade to the Holo-Theaters, and grants 400 Entertainer jobs.
• Reverted many of the leader changes:
  • Leaders once again gain traits at every level.
  • The number of trait picks per level has been set back to 2 by default.
  • Low level traits that were merged and buffed remain so.
• It automates:
  • Automation buildings upkeep now only scales their upkeep with districts they automate: 8/10 for rural districts, 10/12 for city districts - buildings no longer factor into its upkeep.
  • Automation tooltip now mentions the scaling upkeep
  • Automation buildings are now associated with Assembly Patterns and Construction Templates technologies
    • It automates...even for hives.
• Gestalt Machine Empires can now turn off Migration Controls.
• Maintenance Drones now auto-migrate like the Denizens that they are.

Bugfix​

• Fixed space fauna cost values
• Fixed various checks for Offspring Drones that were broken
• Fixed the Permanent Employment civic
• Fixed the planetary supercomputer not having the same modifiers as the research institute
• Fixed the Logistics Hub going missing from the game
• Fixed a broken modifier on the Hive Confluence building
• Fixed telepaths not gaining correct modifiers
• The Clone Army starting event no longer fires twice
• Commercial specialisations now accept all urban buildings
• Fixed BioGenesis not unlocking the crisis tab if you do not own either The Machine Age or Nemesis
• Neglected bio-trophies should now show on the planet UI and have a happiness penalty
• Fixed planetary deposit researcher interactions with gestalt empires
• Maintenance drones now count as better than slaves for assorted checks
• Starting the game as a Nascent Stage Life Seeded empire will no longer leave you with only presapients and immediately game over.
• The opinion penalty for purging pops have been reduced by 100
• The amount of Menace gained from purging pops has been reduced by a factor of 100
• Fixed the Splinter Hive Holding being 100 times more effective than it should have been
• The Coral Portrait now has access to rooted instead of the platypus.
• AI Megacorps will no longer be dirty cheaters that ignore the branch office building limit
• Debris is no longer incorrectly displayed as coming from our own empire.
• Scripted species can now inherit their parent species rights instead of getting default rights
• The Logistics Ceiling setting has been reset to default for everyone since it changed in 4.0
• You may no longer use Fallen empire technology to mine for minerals in the mantle of ringworlds

UI​

• The Build District icon is now more clearly labelled.
• Made some adjustments to the Planet UI to hopefully make it clearer when you can build District Specializations.
• The Build Queue will now automatically start opened in the Surface or Management tabs of the Planet View if there is something in the Queue.
• Clearing a blocker will open the Build Queue if it is closed.
• Fixed the diplomatic window showing the city elements based on the ship set instead of the selected city set.
• Fixed some modifiers from jobs being unlocalized in tooltips.
• Fixed being able to disable event messages if their default settings haven't changed.
• The pop totals in the job strata tooltip are now consistent with the strata UI.
• Fixed missing information in tooltips for why you can't upgrade buildings.

Stability​

• Added more safeguards around ship graphical culture to avoid a crash
• Fix CTD happening when hovering over some leader traits in the selection UI
• Fix CTD related to districts getting deleted while a specialization was in the build queue
• Fixed crash on startup when generating modifiers (Thanks for helping us find this, More Events Mod!)
• Fixed issue with script killing pops assigned to a job may CTD
• Fixed CTD in colonization view due to invalid deposit entry
• Fixes CTD in planets and sector view due to species

Performance​

• Multiple AI performance optimizations
• Reduced memory footprint in growth calculations
• Threaded and cached procreate calculation on pop groups to improve performance
• Reduce calculations done for planet economy

Next Steps​

We’re planning a 4.0.5 patch tomorrow with more fixes. Some of the headline features of that one will include fixes to common desyncs affecting multiplayer stability, district tooltips showing the effects specializations have on them, a fix to hive and machine worlds destroying their rural districts upon terraforming, and performance improvements.

View attachment 1292061​

Here are some partial patch notes - we’re still working on fixes today so this isn’t comprehensive, and as usual with preliminary patch notes some things may be removed from them or changed based on testing.

Spoiler: Stellaris 4.0.5 Partial Patch Notes

Stellaris 4.0.5 Partial Patch Notes​

Improvement​

• Converting a planet into a hive world or machine world now preserves the generator, mining and farming jobs. Known Issue: The special districts on these planets do not swap names or icons to rural districts.
• Void Dwellers, Aquatics and Cave Dwellers now grant their robots the relevant trait when they invent robots

Bugfix​

• Fixed Pearl Divers not mentioning both a food and mineral upkeep in the tooltip
• Fixed some duplicated text on the strong and very strong traits
• Blocked Behemoths from laying eggs in combat
• Fixed the Artifact Relay decision for hive minds
• Fixed the Galactic Market Nomination decision
• Fixed Fanatical Purifiers and Devouring Swarm getting the 'Declare a Rival' Empire Focus
• Bio Titans built in GDF service should now be made of meat and not metal
• Fixes ethics divergence always switching the entire pop group instead of amount
• The Automated Curation Algorithms technology will no longer be offered to Wilderness Empires
• Colonization can not be started again if there's already a colony ship in progress.
• Increased the amount of workforce Wilderness pops gain to 99999, this way if you ever have more than 1000 of a job the wilderness won't start trying to employ pops like a normal empire
• Wilderness Empires will no longer be able to build the automation buildings only to destroy them at the start of the next month
• The Automation Buildings should only show up in a research option once now instead of four times.
• Fixed multiple pre-FTL buildings sticking around after their owners had been invaded
• Advanced AIs now start with some extra unity
• Genocidal Necrophage empires no longer start with a Chamber of Elevation
• Incompatible Cybernetic Creed buildings are removed from the building list when you embrace a Creed
• Finishing Biomorphosis while having 7 tradition trees shouldn't reward a ghost tradition tree
• Fixed the Planetary Supercomputer demanding paperclips
• Permanent Employment now correctly starts with 400 zombies
• Added missing loc from Sanctuary World designation tooltip,
• Scavenger Bot is now named correctly in Timeline Event.
• You can no longer ruin your game-start economy by focusing on astro-mining while using resource consolidation to have no mining stations in your home system (Resource Consolidation and Astro Mining Drones now exclude each other)
• Fix issue where fleet/ship stats were not updated correctly when modifiers changed
• Fix modifiers not having an effect on displayed Fleet Power
• Biomimetic now applies a 50% workforce bonus to roboticist and replicator jobs
• Bodysnatchers now may edit Population Controls, similar to Necrophages.
• The War Fragment will no longer ask you to declare war on empires you have banch offices on. Profit comes first.
• Officials can now get Architectural Focus trait from Resourceful Ascension event
• Eternal Vigilance now also generates Defense Platforms for Deep Space Citadels
• Planet and slave market tooltips will correctly include dystopian specialist jobs into the general specialists list.
• Fixed an issue where if you gained the jump drive tech before researching level 2 and 3 hyperdrives, your science ships and constructors would not be equipped with jump drives
• Fixed a bug that may have sometimes caused pop decline to be determined incorrectly on planets with multiple species.
• Fatal Mutations no longer cause complete planetary extinction
• Pox Bombardment for some weird reason no longer works on mechanical beings
• Armageddon and Pox Bombardment are once again capable of bombing your enemies into the stone-age (tomb-world)

Balance​

• Reduced the biomass cost for planetary expansion for wilderness by roughly 50%
• Xenophobic Individualist machines start with an Alloy Foundry instead of a Medical Center
• Further tweaks to the ethics effects of civilians:
  • Reduced the happiness for xenophobes and pop upkeep for xenophiles by 50%
  • Increased the amenities for pacifists by 10x
  • Doubled the trade for egalitarians.
• Habitats now have a Solar Farming Bay specialisation for their Reactor districts, this gives farmer jobs, turning the district into a hybrid energy/food producer.
• Knights OP:
  • Halved the number of knight jobs from most sources
  • Squires no longer grant the stability of soldiers
  • Reduced the Bonus Pop Growth from the Lover's Pox
• Reduced the Stability from Memorialist job swaps
• Updated Scientist Expertise traits
• Assault armies now cost food instead of minerals for empires with biological ships

UI​

• Changes to modifiers are now mirrored in the UI immediately, even when paused
• Re-added pop decline alert.
• Improvements to the Build District tooltip
  • Now tells you it will Build a District if you can afford it and click on it
  • The modifier tooltip on a district will now also account for the modifiers coming from the district specialization.

Stability​

• Fixed an OOS after hotjoining due to leader trait assignments

We’re currently trying to track down a memory related issue that causes the game to slow down over time - exiting the game and reloading fixes it as a temporary solution but we’re hoping to get a fix in place in either 4.0.5 or 4.0.6. There are also a couple of desyncs that aren’t listed in there yet.

We’ve had a lot of string changes since our last localization pass, and we recognize that it’s difficult to play with so many English placeholders. 4.0.5 should fix some of the most common issues in Chinese, and early next week we’re planning a patch that will more comprehensively update localization for all non-English languages.

What’s Next?​

Tomorrow (May 7th) at 5 PM CEST (8 AM PDT) we have an AMA (“Ask me Anything”) scheduled in /r/Stellaris on Reddit - you can post questions now if you like. We’re also going to be holding a free weekend on Steam starting May 8th, after the 4.0.5 release.

Next week we’ll have the traditional post-release Stellaris Art Blast and more patches and updates - likely not at the pace we’ve kept up this week, but I expect that we’ll probably have two.

Thank you for your patience, and thank you for playing Stellaris.

If the answer is anything but 'We will never ever EVER do this stupid, inane release of bad product again and everyone gets rebates if they subscribed for this monumental and unacceptable release of bad product' then all of this is white noise. And apologies are only worthwhile when they result in changed behavior...We've had these apologies before, nothing has changed in the company's behavior...I am unwilling to take them with anything but a grain of salt.

As to 'keeping as far from the summer holidays as possible' Then you shouldn't have released it until you were back, or....scheduled to have a reduced holiday season to accommodate, you know, breaking your game, again. At every point the answer was...WAIT UNTIL IT WAS READY! Not rush it out the door broken...

 

[TtheHF]

If the answer is anything but 'We will never ever EVER do this again and everyone gets rebates if they subscribed for this' then all of this is white noise. And apologies are only worthwhile when they result in changed behavior...We've had these apologies before, nothing has changed in the company's behavior...I am unwilling to take them with anything but a grain of salt.

As to 'keeping as far from the summer holidays as possible' Then you shouldn't have released it until you were back, or....scheduled to have a reduced holiday season to accommodate, you know, breaking your game, again. At every point the answer was...WAIT UNTIL IT WAS READY! Not rush it out the door broken...

I agree entirely but the reality of the situation is that there is a narrative the devs on here must follow which is dictated by management/the corporation was in all likelihood agreed upon before release and cannot be deviated from. We all appreciate the artists and writers and devs of Stellaris and know that they make amazing software and are dedicated to making products that we love. But they are managed and paid by a corporation who see their customer base as little more than the means to a financial end, and really only care about optics as far as it impacts their next shareholder meeting.

Expecting anything but public optics management from anyone on here is unfair as they would literally endanger their livelihoods and those of their teams by speaking openly. The devs had to have known the release was going to be contentious and undoubtedly discussed all of this with management before the decision to release the patch in its current shape was taken. A determination was made at some point that it was preferable to the company to release the patch as is and manage the fallout rather than letting it cook to completion.

All of our discussion here is wasted. The only option that will is to not buy their products until they are working. I'm not getting it until I hear from my fellows that it is working nicely.

 

[Masked Ermine]

I agree entirely but the reality of the situation is that there is a narrative the devs on here must follow which is dictated by management/the corporation was in all likelihood agreed upon before release and cannot be deviated from. We all appreciate the artists and writers and devs of Stellaris and know that they make amazing software and are dedicated to making products that we love. But they are managed and paid by a corporation who see their customer base as little more than the means to a financial end, and really only care about optics as far as it impacts their next shareholder meeting.

Expecting anything but public optics management from anyone on here is unfair as they would literally endanger their livelihoods and those of their teams by speaking openly. The devs had to have known the release was going to be contentious and undoubtedly discussed all of this with management before the decision to release the patch in its current shape was taken. A determination was made at some point that it was preferable to the company to release the patch as is and manage the fallout rather than letting it cook to completion.

All of our discussion here is wasted. The only option that will is to not buy their products until they are working. I'm not getting it until I hear from my fellows that it is working nicely.

Then the only way we'll see change is by making the managers see our anger, that means refraining from giving them our money. Not by sucking up their empty, marketing apologies, like so much hot Gazpacho. I know the devs can't do anything, but if the marketers and the execs only see things when the buyers revolt then dammit it's time for the buyers to revolt.

This is about the third time I've heard a version of this 'apology' from the devs. Sorry, cannot, will not accept it. If the company cannot flex in the face of their clear incapabilities to provide good product upon release, at some point that means...they no longer are obliged to my money... They will get it, when I think the release is at an acceptable level, and I do strongly urge the Paradox execs to consider giving the subscribers to their subscription DLC system...free season access this season, if not the next because I expect this update's gonna fudge things up for a bit.

 

[AvatarThomas]

btw you guys should update Stellaris Steam page picture to feature new planetary UI

 

[rodgerdavies]

I've got a basket of Stellaris items I had lined up, but the concern over the AI ability to deal with the game has me paused on that for now. It was in a very nice place last time I played.

I really appreciate the communication approach though and the frequent patching, as well as the dedication to address long term issues with the base game performance (this was previously my biggest issue); I know it will be turned around at some point but I realise it may take time before I can properly get back into the game again.

Keep talking to us, thanks!

 

[Masked Ermine]

Like I get it, no one wants to get tough on the devs because they are our secret buddies....they're just like us, powerless in the face of the machine itself....

But no...I'm sorry, that's parasocial behavior. I am a consumer, I am buying a product the Devs, at least as they are on this forum, are a sales team and at times customer service for. We are in a business relationship. They aren't our friends, their obligation is to paradox and marketing Paradox's product, first. That includes these apologies and pandering to our memes and inside jokes. Is it nice to have these forums, is it nice to have these diaries...arguably yes, but they are, let us not forget, firstly a marketing tool, and only tangentially a feedback tool...as evidenced now when an inordinate number of people said 'Chief...this ain't it' and yet here we are once again with a game kneecapped by an update that will likely stretch until what at least October.

 

[Stephono97]

Hello. This was important enough for me to finally figure out how to get my forum account working instead of just lurking.

First, I am honestly still excited for the DLC. I really wish there was an option more like nanites, focusing on swarms instead of big monsters, but I can really respect the idea behind the behemoth crisis path (though the end gameplay seems odd from what I have heard, an option to keep going after wining, eat the galaxy, and maybe become stronger by consuming worlds could be a fun reward). Secondly, this patch was really really really buggy. I restarted several games as the bugs (and unpolished gameplay) drove me insane. Gestalts and wilderness seemed to be hit fairly hard in particular. Paradox has consistently produced a game I like, and they have enough credibility that I am certain the game will be fixed/improved. That being said... honestly, if this was marked as an early access with the final version in a week or two, that probably would have been better. I like the ambition of the DLC and 4.0 changes, but it seems like time was just a bit too tight.

If any of the devs read this, there is one bug/gameplay design change I would metaphorically lobby for. Wilderness pops in biomass seem to be getting marked as complex drones at least part of the time. Under some situations you can overspend on biomass, consume the drones working menial jobs (I don't really know what triggers this as I often have spare biomass jobs when this happens), and other drones working biomass jobs won't work those jobs due to the job stata drifference. For some reason new drones grow as complex drones, meaning those jobs can be unfilled for many months/maybe years even when you have spare pops. I can play arround this/reload when it happens, but that is probably the big issue I have before I try wilderness again.

 

[ItThatAltersSanity]

Continuing my save from 4.0.1, now in 4.0.4 and with enough colonies around for me to contemplate the UI for a rising blob:
- Planets & Sector view: planets that aren't in a sector don't show up here, there is no frontier-sector
- my founder species met the fallen hive empire and agreed to a few mutations, one of which is "all newborns are pre-sapients until 5 years old". This makes the Planets & Sector view cluttered when showing how many pops I have: it's not good to see 4 stacks of my founder species with slightly different genes. I want to see at a glance which planet has spare pops I can resettle and I just can't do that right now.
- I can't choose which robot template should be assembled from the planet UI. This matters: in 3.14 and earlier, I typically had 20 colonies producing robots that were irrelevant for them so I could resettle them to the one place I wanted to fast-track. I still want to do this in 4.0 since I can only have one robot assembly plant per planet, so there's still incentive to spread out my assembly.
- I look forward to the Big UI experiments in summer as I can't grasp how many pops are in each strata of a given planet without scrolling around. I'm trying to find planets that have colonists or civilians and it's not a quick workflow right now.
- the sliding bars for setting job limits is good. The Archives district specialisation gives 4 job types and I can quickly tweak what the priority is if I over-invest in urban districts.
- when I hover over the "Build Urban District" button, I'd like to see how many jobs I'll be making due to the district specialisations.

 

[FlyingPhoenix]

I don't see anything in the change-log about Shipyards displaying "Corvettes: Corvette Corvette" etc instead of "Corvettes: [Class Name] [Class Name] Etc. I previously reported that here.

I noticed that Tuesday, too, and made a bug report yesterday, which has been confirmed by the devs, see here:

Stellaris - [4.0.4] [6a76] UI - No Ship Class Names in Station Build Screen

Description [4.0.4] [6a76] UI - No Ship Class Names in Station Build Screen Game Version 4.0.4 What version do you use? Steam What expansions do you have installed? Plantoids, Humanoids, Synthetic Dawn, Utopia, Leviathans Story Pack...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

 

[TheFunMachine]

What're people seeing with the AI?

In my current game going from .0.3 - .0.4. I'm noticing regular AI empires really falling off the overall power curve on Captain by mid game. Core planets not well developed, weak fleets, etc.

 

[fourteenfour]

BioGenesis is a fantastic expansion and I’m incredibly proud of what we accomplished with it, but I have to be honest - like its namesake, the free patch alongside BioGenesis has been a little bit on fire.

During the lead-up to the release, I was confident that we would be able to finish the revamp and clean up the most critical bugs. We fell short of that goal, and we’re committed to continuing to fix things until the 4.0 release is in the state it needs to be in.

While some suggested delaying the release until the game was in better shape, I wanted to keep as much distance as we could from the summer holidays. I was concerned about repeating a 2.2-style situation, where we couldn't provide full post-launch support for the game and it remained broken for too long. Like the 2.2 changes, however, I strongly believe that the system changes in 4.0 improve Stellaris and will give us the platform we need to rise from those ashes and grow for years to come.

To be blunt, you are not getting my money at all this year until you take a more customer first attitude. I am not your guinea pig. I am not even trying to play right now and won't even bother till end of the month in the hopes you can fix the ridiculous number of issues players found let alone the ones you declared. Someone should combine all the patch notes from the launch today.

I am a bit miffed to say the least.

 

[prismaticmarcus]

Now I love all this but I have a bug report for you for something that's been an issue for a very long time

Stellaris - Diplomacy portrait alien "greeting noise" volume

Description Diplomacy portrait alien "greeting noise" volume Game Version release/3.13.0/develop What version do you use? Steam What expansions do you have installed? Plantoids, Humanoids, Synthetic Dawn, Utopia, Leviathans Story Pack...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Please, my ears can't take it anymore

Turning 'effects' volume down doesn't help?

 

[currylambchop]

And a funny thing: Steam is arguably part of the problem here. Their crackdown on vapourware season passes has probably made delaying a season pass item a perilous choice.

Yeah that’s a big issue with delaying nowadays

 

[TtheHF]

Turning 'effects' volume down doesn't help?

It does affect it but the issue is that the greetings are deafening compared to every other sound effect, so you need to turn sounds off. Until the mod mentioned in that thread I had to play Stellaris on mute because of how loud the greetings are. That this is the first interaction a dev mod has had with the issue says low key terrifying things about the QA of this game utility of the bug report forum.

 

[Troyen]

Purely as information, do you know when the summer break will be? Or is it even known yet? Knowing how long we have would help rather a lot.

In general it tends to start around mid-to-late June, so that would be my guess unless otherwise specified. Probably slightly different for different teams (Vic 3's DLC launches end of June).

Turning 'effects' volume down doesn't help?

Even if it did, the problem is it's way louder than the other effects, so you either get earsplitting diplomatic greetings while being able to hear the other stuff, or you can't hear the other game effects because your effect slider has been dropped to 10%.