[Dev Team] 4.0.16 Hotfix Released (checksum 05ae)

[Dr Pippy]

Fallen empire building techs are less likely to crowd out your research options.

This is certainly better than it was, but it's still not in a very good state. It's strictly worse than it was in 4.0.14 and should be reverted until you all have a chance to do a more careful balance pass on Cosmogenesis, etc.

A few points I noticed from my late-game playthrough:

• I did 5 rounds of tech for each branch of research; out of 105 draws, 56 (53%) of them were FE repeatables. So it's still cutting the options for repeatable tech to half of what a non-cosmogenesis empire would have. This no longer unplayable, but it's still pretty bad. (In fact, I'm looking at my earlier post about this and see that in 4.0.15 I drew 64% FE repeatables, so it looks like this is only a modest reduction in the draw chance.)
• There are still separate repeatable techs for each building and its upgrade. This doesn't make any sense, as they both increase the build limit for the same building. Only one tier of the FE tech should be repeatable; this would cut down on FE repeatable spam by a factor of 2.
• I still think that it's way too tedious having one tech per building; it would be better to have each tech improve a group of buildings:

It would be better for each repeatable tech to increase the limit of a category of buildings. E.g. "Perfect Arcologies II" could increase the Justice Complex, Shrinkspace Depot, and Sky Dome. If you take the names and categories from the Cosmogenesis crisis levels, that cuts down on the number of repeatable techs from 32 to 5, which is a lot more sustainable.

 

[TheChaserG]

Wilderness Empires no longer have to consolidate 2500 biomass on a planet to build a Grand Archive

Does this remove the requirement all together or is it just tweaked for the better? Either way it was annoying that I couldn't build anything on my planets while I waited for it to get built lol.

 

[Adaman5280]

I sympathize with the devs, who I imagine would prefer working on a real Stellaris 2—or even 5—rather than endlessly bandaging up this bloated and unwieldy piece of software. The scheduled releses of DLCs while never having enough time to reach stability hurts Stellaris too much.

It was only a matter of time before someone brought up stellaris 2 again lmao

 

[Alpiderman]

The game crashes when i try to host a savefile (made in the 4.0.17 Beta Patch)

 

[Amightypie]

Edit 2: Fast save transfer is up now

are you sure? seems to be even worse at save transfer now

 

[RingworldUtopia]

Hello,

Yesterday's 4.0.15 patch introduced two high impact issues that have since been fixed, included in a game build, and released.
The newest version 4.0.16 should now be available for download.

Stellaris 4.0.16 Hotfix​

• Wilderness Empires will no longer destroy themselves when spending biomass
• Virtuality will not delete unemployed pops on colonization

Apologies for any planetary inconveniences caused.

hi can we give enigmatic engineering a little bit more of an advantage with the fallen empire buildings again? 1 per repeatable seems low, maybe they can get 2 or 3.

 

[Demoulius]

Why are the agricultural districts on my relic world suddenly gone?

 

[LuPoNe]

Either you've got 100 years into a new game in 2 hours or that's an old Save, a lot of changes won't be retroactive.

It's a save started in 4.0.15 test branch, so not that old, restarted especially because of shenaningans happening in previous games thoughs these patches (I'm at the 5th game restart, and I'm basically beta testing this instead of enjoying it a little bit in the little free time in between life and work duties).

 

[Troyen]

the fact all these new things came together wrong is most likely due to half the changes being made by the Custodian team that usually fixes and fits the changes made by other teams, so there wasn't anyone else to do it and it released at the same time as the DLC.

I just would like to point out the Custodians normally do the big reworks. The Unity, fleet combat, and habitat reworks were all done by Custodians, so them taking on the economy isn't unusual.

Instead of right now where for the last two years we've had a fast cadence of 3 DLC a year, this year they tagged a whole DLC into one of those slots and took the implementation and integration(Custodian) team and gave them a FLC to work on and release simultaneaously. We went from 3 DLC with sufficient Custodial time last year(and there were still troubles) to a DLC and a FLC with no Custodial time and 2 more DLC coming up with still a lot to do on the first two before we get there.

I think the 3 DLC pace per year is a problem because it keeps adding more stuff for the Custodians to polish faster than they can get around to tackling it. Separating out incredibly massive giant reworks from big DLC would also definitely benefit.

The real problem is they tried to do too many reworks at the same time. Pop changes alone with all the "multiply/divide by 100" bugs that caused is a big change. The building/zone rework should've been in a subsequent patch. Doing both together was an invitation for chaos. My guess is the Stellaris UI is notoriously hard to work with and they only wanted to change it once.

(The trade rework also exists but is a relatively minor change that it could have also slipped into a hypothetical smaller 4.0.)

I strongly believe we would not be facing half the issues right now if 4.0 and Biogenesis has been separated; we even had two DLC within a month in spring 2023 with First Contact and Paragons, and the issues weren't compounding this much from what I remember. The Leader rework isn't my favourite but I seem to remember that and the First Contact and Intel reworks being mostly functional.

I assume you meant "leader" rework instead of "intel" (which was 3.0 and also not quite as messy). Both of those DLC launched with issues (pre-FTLs were nuking themselves like crazy when FC launched and that didn't get fixed until the GP patch, GP launched and made everyone upset with the new stringent leader limits that took until 3.10 to calm down). But their issues were contained to one aspect of the system. People weren't happy with the leader system as it existed in 3.8, but only leaders really were busted. 4.0 changed so many things that the usual "20% of the feature will be polished post-patch" applies to almost everything.

 

[RingworldUtopia]

Why are the agricultural districts on my relic world suddenly gone?

not every relic world gets agricultural districts, it's random like any other world, with lower chance of them on relic worlds. as far as i know.

 

[Blackadder23]

I sympathize with the devs, who I imagine would prefer working on a real Stellaris 2—or even 5—rather than endlessly bandaging up this bloated and unwieldy piece of software. The scheduled releses of DLCs while never having enough time to reach stability hurts Stellaris too much.

The release schedule isn't the problem. The problem is that the devs won't stop reinventing the wheel and completely changing basic elements of the game like population growth and the economy. If they would just keep their hands off of those parts of the game, it might finally become stable.

 

[Dawnshot]

You may no longer scrap 50% of your virtual pops for alloys.

I mean, you could RP it as scrapping the servers they're stored on...

But I get it from a game mechanic perspective.

 

[Thiend]

I do concur. So maybe it should apply to civilians, or alternatively bureaucrats.

I think the most equivalent effect would be it applying as a bonus effect on Monuments, that they apply to civilians.

This would apply in the same circumstances it used to (since Culture Workers were a job FROM Monuments), and would make it as easy to apply the bonus to a job as it originally was designed for.

 

[ShoGuL]

Can confirm that wilderness still kills itself when using all your biomass

 

[yarpus]

Bugs:

• If Leader starts with +x Starting Level at the start of the game (Commander Ruler with Distinguished Admiralty) he starts at higher level but has no extra traits.
• When looking at Civilian stratum in planet management it displays all Civilians as unemployed (the crossed briefcase icon). Hovering over the icon tells you that no Civilians are unemployed.

Oversights

• Galactic Curators / Antiquarian Expertise Civics still provide bonuses for non-existing Culture Worker job (RIP).
• Civilian Count in planetary view is displayed in Red. Proposal: display it in yellow.

Balance Concerns:

• Civilians remain insanely strong. It's even hard to come back to "normal" Stellaris after the Seasonal Dormancy + Utopian Abundance + Trickle Up Economy + Autochton Monument + start. Proposal of nerfs below:
  • Make Seasonal Dormancy give -15% Pop Upkeep to Civilians OR make it give -75% Job Output to Civilians and . They are working after all.
  • Reduce or remove Unity/Research that Utopian Abundance gives to Civilians. Or make it unlockable over the course of the game (Harmony tradition?).
  • Reduce amount of Pops day 1. The only way to utilize them is to go full Civilian economy.
• Luxury Housing is still a bit too efficient. I have a proposal for improvement:
  • Make it so Luxury Housing adds small amount of Housing and Amenities (+200 Amenities) per Urban District. Make them limited to 1 per planet.
• Genetic Identification Civic is awfully weak, as fan of movie Gattaca I cry whenever I see it. Proposals for improvements below:
  • -15% Crime only affects Crime left after Crime & Crime Reduction modifiers. Either make this % reduction affect total Crime before Crime Reduction is counted or replace it with flat Crime reduction on all worlds (just like edicts do it).
  • Add -15% Empire Size from Pops. To reduce stacking possibilities, make it conflict with Beacon of Liberty.
  • Replace Councilor effects (both are common & stronger in other Civics) with +0.05 Society per 100 Pops. It nicely represents that all the data you collect on citizens can support your research.
• Stalwart Network Civic is also awfully weak. Just compare it to Sovereign Guardianship's Councilor position. It needs some additional bonuses for Starbases / Defensive Platforms / Deepspace Citadel.
  • Increase bonus to Fire Rate in Home Territory. SG can get up to +50%, +25% would be good enough here.
  • Add +25% Hull/Armor bonuses for Starbases/Defensive Platforms/Deepspace Citadel or -25% cost.

Small Improvements Proposal:

• Empire Focus rerolls are already time-gated and very random. Having to pay 100 Unity to reroll is too much. Consider reducing the cost, removing it or replacing it with Influence cost.
• Replace Corporation's +1 Foreign Leader with +1 Envoy. Every Corporation needs Envoys. Noone needs Foreign Leaders except from Xenophiles.

 

[CoconutJones]

Why are the agricultural districts on my relic world suddenly gone?

im having the same issue loaded up save from last night and all my food is gone.

Please fix the hegemony bug. Federations are a major game mechanics and having the AI redirect the request to leave sent to another AI empire that is not the hegemon when the hegemon is a human player, so the AI can pretty much leave as it please, pretty much breaks this kind of federation gameplay.

yeah this killed one of my factions, had everyone in my hegemony leave in the middile of a war

anyone able to tell if Nihilistic acquisition is bugged, trying a necrophage and cant kidnap the pre ftl people sense 4.0..15 hit

 

[DvdBoon]

Flash forge still not free.

 

[夜深Yetsion]

Synaptic Lathe？You forgot again？​

 

[snowy801]

Small Improvements Proposal:

• Empire Focus rerolls are already time-gated and very random. Having to pay 100 Unity to reroll is too much. Consider reducing the cost, removing it or replacing it with Influence cost.

Why would influence cost be cheaper than unity cost? Influence is a far more valuable resource.

 

[SirJosephus]

The lathe is still bugged. Every patch you say it's fixed, but it's still not correctly processing populations. I've seen others on reddit with the same issue. This is paid content and a massive feature of The Machine Age, but it's not usable. This really needs to be addressed, I'm paying for content I cannot use.