Stellaris 3.99.5 'Phoenix' Open Beta Release Notes

[Eladrin]

Today's update includes some major changes to building/zone/district balance, including "spammable" basic buildings that provide a flat number of jobs.

Spoiler: Stellaris 3.99.5 'Phoenix' Open Beta Release Notes

Stellaris 3.99.5 ‘Phoenix’ Open Beta update​

Beta Features​

• Added the Betharian Zone. (To Mining Districts!)
• “Venerable Scientist" (Mandarin Language) Voice Advisor
• Added new color variants for stargazer portrait

Fixes and Improvements​

• Unbroke all colonies.
• Fixed issues with Catalytic Processing civics.
• Fixed the zone planet modifiers not being applied if districts have multiples of the same zone type.
• Fixed the Chosen's habitats.
• Pirates are a little less gung-ho to form.
• Planetary deficits now cost trade instead of providing it.
• Increased the base rate of Auto-Migration.
• Pops will now automatically migrate to planets with 20% habitability or higher instead of 40% or higher.
• When the maximum number of auto-modded pops changes, the current number is now updated correctly.
• City Districts now change their name and descriptions based on their zone specializations.
• Compressed unity jobs and added job swaps.
• City set graphics scale adjusted.
• Updated Empire Progression Rewards to always display which technology is unlocked.
• Allowed rural zones on ringworlds.
• Removed bonus production on tier 1 buildings, removed tier 1 buildings planet limit.
• Pop count, Housing, and Amenities on the planet view now use short notation (such as 13.4k rather than 13405).
• Replaced Upgrade buttons for districts with icons.
• Background graphics added for all districts.
• Added progress bars to the zones that are being built or replaced.
• District/Zone/Building Construction tooltips added.
• Changed how selected District is being highlighted.
• Highlight the selected zone slot when building new zones.
• Display old zone name, icon and building slots if the zone is being replaced.
• Display the icon and name of the zone being constructed.
• Rural district zones can now also be built by clicking anywhere within the empty zone slot.
• Further Timeline UI adjustments, fixing background masking.
• Added designation description in the colonization UI.
• Adjusted district numbers in the colonization UI to show the max amount of possible districts.
• Added functionality to deselect a selected colony designation.
• Rearranged and tweaked colony modifier displaying in the colonization UI.
• Added new databank icons.
• Added starting notification for selecting Empire Focus.
• Added planetary deficits to the Planetary view,

How Do I Opt Into the Beta?​

1. Turn off your mods. They will almost certainly cause you to crash.
2. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas -> select "stellaris_test - 3.99.5 Open Beta" branch in the Beta Participation dropdown.

All previous 3.99.* Open Beta branches will also remain available. If you are having issues accessing the latest version of the 3.99.* Open Beta, please see this forum post for troubleshooting.

For more information on the Open Beta, as well as the intentions and goals of releasing such an early, unpolished version, please see this dev diary.

This week's feedback survey looks at first impressions of Precursor selection, Databank, Species Modification, and Game Pacing Adjustments.

This week's Open Beta feedback survey is available here!​

 

[Eladrin]

I should explicitly call out that the Engineering Lab, Bio Lab, and Physics Lab will turn all of your Engineers, Biologists, and Physicists into whichever one you build. Lots of job numbers have been changed - this current version has 100 jobs for most things, 50 if it provides 2, and 30 if it provides 3.

Some of the tooltips are really terrible in this build, my current mission is to improve some of them.

 

[Eladrin]

Argh, I misread some internal notes. It'll be going up around 10 like normal. (In about half an hour.)

 

[Eladrin]

I was wondering, it was way earlier than usual.

It got pushed for QA to smoke test, not to live deployment. Whoops.

One of the things in this build, that I showed off on the stream, was that flavor text on City Districts is now in - I wouldn't mind if you could all let me know whether it helps reinforce the connection between Zones modifying the City District. I haven't added it to the rural districts or habitats yet.

 

[Eladrin]

Just in time for the weekend, nice. What will cause pirates to spawn now that trade lanes are gone?

The current version will now wait at least 10 years, and will spawn in unoccupied systems if there are any nearby systems with 300 trade. (Before this update, there wasn't the 10 year timer, and it was only 100 trade, which meant that they would always spawn 30 days after game start.)

 

[Eladrin]

This mechanic is horrible for me. It turns all scientists on the entire planet to that specialisation. I need several planets with research districts before I can even consider using them.

The specialized research buildings aren't mandatory. If you want a general research world, you can build other buildings in your Research Zones instead.

 

[Eladrin]

The new update should now be available!

 

[Eladrin]

Wouldn't it be better for Energy Grid, Mineral Purification Plants, and Food Processing Facilities to remain planet-unique output boosting buildings, and instead restore pre-2.2 Hydroponics Farms, Power Plants, and Mining Network buildings as the "spammable" buildings?

Then you could replace the starting Food Processing Facilities for Void Dwellers with a Hydroponics Farms building, to keep Hydroponics Farms as the "get extra Farmer jobs" building.

Yes, we'll very likely change which building is which in the final version, with Hydroponics Farms and the like being the spammable "flat jobs" buildings.

 

[Eladrin]

Would be good to see what jobs I would add to a planet if I upgraded an urban zone, rather than having to do some quick maths for what each zone is adding

When I was ranting about tooltips earlier this was one of the big ones. We need to show you what you'll get for upgrading a district or building a zone.

• Pop count, Housing, and Amenities on the planet view now use short notation (such as 13.4k rather than 13405).

Oh NICE! Thank god. I have been privately really irked by the super duper inflated numbers barely squeezing into the UI before. This is perfect. Thank you!

Kinda crazy all the changes that are happening (multiplying all pop related code by ten!) just to basically have a little "K" there instead of a naked "13.4", but nonetheless we're in it now and I feel like as of this patch you get to have your cake and eat it too. Brilliant.

The increased granularity of the pops is one of the things that I really wanted in the new scale - constant growth of pops across all pop groups and continual migration rather than rarer but larger chunks.

I've only played for a bit but I'm not sure I like this change too much. For some buildings it makes sense but stuff like the energy grid and mineral purification it feels kind of weak and thematically confused to have them just add flat jobs. I've already built a zone and those districts can only have one zone, so why do I need a building that also adds jobs? IMO it would be better if those did what they did before and modified the jobs.

We're planning on doing a pass to have building titles better reflect what they do. (Like Hydroponic Farms should probably be the "flat jobs" building, while "Food Processing" should improve the jobs.)

To clarify how this works is the third district irrelevant to the flavor, or is there a weighting to the titles and the game goes with the highest weighted one? Or I guess another way to put it is: “does the ordering of districts matter for flavor text?”

We have a list of possible names, and it takes the first one in the list that is "true". (So earlier in the list is higher weight.)

All of the combinations that we added in this pass are either one or two zones. However, one of the changes that I've been considering based on feedback is actually removing one City Zone slot from planets, increasing the free Government Zone to have six building slots, and framing them more explicitly as City Specialization. While this is similar mechanically to "forcing" an Urban Zone, it may make the intent of "zones are intended to be your way of picking what special district you want here" more of a real thing.

 

[Eladrin]

Anyone else found betharian fields yet?

Am I doing something wrong or is the zone still missing?

Betharian's a mineral, the zone turns your miners into energy producers.

If you do this I'd want a mixed unity/science zone, so that you can still produce scaling amounts of all resources with a single planet.

Interesting idea. Would mirror the industrial zone nicely.

 

[Eladrin]

What I understood is: we do not want to manage an Empire anymore — we are managing isolated planets!

What does this mean:
Zones are there to set up the fundamentals for a self-sustaining output planet. We don’t have dedicated planets anymore for a single type of resource, but we should look at the final important output at the end of the production chain — e.g., Alloys, Research, Unity, some Strategic Resources. Stuff we want to use on an Empire level.

I actually have no idea how you came to this conclusion, and would appreciate more explanation.

One of my biggest concerns is actually that Zones currently very heavily encourage and reward the hyper-specialization of planets. (With a small amount of trade upkeep being the primary downside, but a single specialized Trade planet should cover all of those costs.)

 

[Eladrin]

Any hope of seeing 3.99.6 today?

We're planning a 3.99.6 later on today, and we've decided that we're going to do one more update this Friday, cherry-picking some more fixes and changes into the Open Beta.