Stellaris 3.99.7 'Phoenix' Open Beta Release Notes

[NoXeno]

Almost one point in each tech category per zone/lab job is really harsh. Though some planetary feature supercharge output with extra upkeep is pretty good. Overall abstract resource job output downgrade need some balance. Unity can barely support upgraded leaders like 5~6 lv4+ leaders will take most of home world archive zone output. Non-exist research will make unlock scend zone on colony with T2 tech rolls quite difficult. Excess CG and basic resource just throwed into trade to solve deficit.

 

[Everstill]

We went through that for a period in the Wiz era when there were a string of unfinished buggy releases that would break sections of the game (usually involving the AI) for weeks/months until fixes could roll out. People were understandably upset and he did not respond well to the criticism. It devolved into the typical passive aggressive "man the customers sure are toxic" response we see when things go south. Back then even just getting betas was like pulling teeth. Eventually he even threatened to cut back on communication overall if the community didn't shape up and start responding better to his releases. That went over about as well as you'd expect.

A little while later new management took over and revolutionized communication and interaction, brought in the custodians and now I would argue Stellaris has the most informative and responsive dev team among PDX. So however 4.0 is received I hope that doesn't change. The last thing we need is a return to the bad old days.

Man, this really put perspective in the Wiz days and the current devs. They really are open and engaged with the community. They really tried a lot to improve the game, specially with the custodian team.

Please make Habitats destructible and add a possibility to switch them off in Game Setup.

Game option menu to disable habitats is needed for a long time.

 

[Lenk]

Finally gotten time to play the beta because life, and my initial response to the planet view is that, It looks way nicer but needs more touch ups. The previous planet view I liked how everything was presented on the initial page, like planet decisions, tile blockers, and accessions and I understood everything at a glance but now their spread across couple of different pages.

I like how buildings are more like modifiers to districts but I would appreciate it represented in the tooltips, but overall I miss not having the ability to upgrade the buildings. I hope the 4.0 will use different building icons to differentiate between the different researcher types like how it was in 1.0 days like bio lab looked different from engineering.

Cosmogensis Empires should be able to upgrade their capitals to Arcane Palaces (they could just precursor jobs for the civilians) so they could use the full Fallen Empire building set instead of having all the super advance buildings next to brick building.

The early game really feels like deficit joggling epically with consumer goods, maybe the base output of jobs should be increase a little? If we are going to have a good population boost at game start we should be able to sustain that population prior (in terms of game timeline before game start) Not sure if I'm wording that right? But it does feel like it takes longer and rather annoying to deal with trying to stabilize the economy at the start. I think some origins might become unplayable without tweaking.

One origin I am concerned with is The Under One rule origin. There are events tied to the origin I think they might be difficult to over come or meet due to the changes mechanically with how resources are produced or how situations progress.

The Unifying Promise situation point values might need to be lowered because you cannot colonize every planet because it will just hurt you economically (because you cannot generate enough workforce on the planets to offset the costs of the planet) despite you need the points for Unifying Promise to increase your luminary's trait. Whereas how the game currently is you can still build a decent economy off colonizing every world to justify doing it which will allow you pay the costs of the events, where in the beta you will struggle a lot just fail to get pass the the event checks for resources thus punishing you further.

When doing the fall portion of the origin, I think there needs to be event added or stuff reworked because I don't think it might be possible to get enough unity to get pass all the aforementioned event resource checks and rush through the tradition trees to the desired ascension path to get the special ending trait before the fall event starts which locks you out of getting the trait. Out of my 3 runs I have failed to get to the trait in each run with the current beta.

 

[Weyird]

Most important things needed before release, in my opinion:

1) UI ISSUE: showing different groups of a population in the management tab is useless. Its fine if that's behind the scenes, or even visible in some extra menu, but just showing the species population feels better.
2) UI ISSUE: the entire employment tab needs some heavy rework. It takes up way too much space as is while giving too little info, needing each category ro be opened to get the info tou want that is then, again, taking up too much space needing you to scroll down to find what you want (aka how many researchers or artisans or whatever you have)
3) it doesn't feel like my empire is getting technologically advanced as the game progresses. I'd like it if time and tech FELT like the world was changing, on a planet level. In 3.14 it didnt achieve that either, but at least the tech unlocked upgraded buildings that you could slowly replace your old buildings with. It felt like progression, even though it was annoying to manage planets. Now it unlocks one building that you build and then you're done.
4) planets don't feel unique. There's, i think, two ways to go here. One is that I'm reminded of the FEEL of that tv show Firefly. It felt like there were the core planets with high standards of living (or severe poverty), that were twchnologically advanced - probably lots of research or beurocracy or pleasure happening there, but probably not a lot of farming or mining. Then there were the outer planets that were being mined or farmed, to send resources back to the core. I dunno, that FELT like something. Planets now just feel dead with resources coming out of them.
The second thing is I think the dev team needs to look at the Civilization games for inspiration here (at least civ 6, coz i havent played the new one yet). That's also a 4X game and cities felt special and important. Wonders did a grand job of that - if a city had a wonder that let troops there get a free promotion, well boy, i remembered that city was my army producing city. Or another city had a lot of hills or forests around for great production. Special or unique buildings and wonders did a good job of that; but it was A LOT to do with the environment that surrounded your city. Stellaris has planetary features and modifiers... THOSE should play SUCH a role in planets. Honestly, playing in the beta, i got the event where physicists got turned into portal research jobs. I INSTANTLY turned all my researchers into physicists and I REMEMERED that planet. It was cool and unique and special. Thats a GREAT thing thats only now doable with the beta. Getting that event and feeling that positively about that planet was a HUGE win for the beta.
There was also the fact that, production-wise, you couldn't build everything everywhere in Civ 6. You had to make choices on what to focus on. Civ achieved that by limiting how much production a city had, or by wonders being 1-per-world kinda thing. Stellaris does that by limiting the numbers of buildings and pops you have, which is incredibly gemeric and the same on each and every single planet (except heavily limited by planet size, which is just a random limiter and which also then becomes super important).
5) planetary designations suck. I think almost all of the issues in this game stem from the fact that they exist, or are implemented as they are. As long as there is a planetary designation that makes one job more efficient, well, it becomes de facto that as many pops on the planet NEED to be doing that job to feel efficient - and FEELING efficient is one of the ways players have fun. Another person had some great ideas for how to change planetary designstions, but i def think energy/mining/farming worlds shouldnt exist, but rather only the rural world. As is i never use rural world because why would i do three things i less efficiently when i could have three worlds each doing one thing efficiently? But then the planets arent interesting, then it's ONLY my energy or minerals planet.
6) balance in general. I trust they'll get there, tho. That's just numbers.

 

[Newbee53]

I'm enjoying my game this run through quite well, but I've run into some things that bother me.

I still can't tell if the automation is working.

Planets feel a little better to work with now that I'm more used to two zones. But the colony designations are way to focused on pure single output planets. We have urban centers which are trade plus buildings. And we have industrial centers for alloys/CG. No more rural zones. Nothing that is general in any other way. It's kind of frustrating. Especially when you know you primarily want basic resources out of this planet.

A plus in this build is that trade is not tied to energy. This means I have plenty of trade, even when I'm not producing a lot, to fill in the needs of my empire. If it was tied to energy, I'd end up having to sell a tone of energy over and over again just to build buildings or more ships. This is what I understand the market is for, so that's a huge help that I'm not wasting that trade.

I'd like to see more buildings that modify jobs, less buildings that provide jobs. Or maybe we can have buildings that provide jobs based on number of cities or districts. That could be interesting for the story.

On the UI. While the symbol doesn't show in the outliner. the little number for notification of planets with unemployment shows if there is even one unemployed pop. It's a minor thing, as the change in unemployment notifications is amazing and I love it.

Now with the yellow briefcase showing when migration is happening, I can more easily manage my empire wide job allocations as I know always know when all my jobs are filled. really nice. Moreover, it's made it much easier to know whether or not I have enough civilians to open a bunch of optional jobs. I'm learning what a healthy economy looks like, and its starting to work quite well.

 

[st360]

It was useless before. In fact, you can play completely ignoring storms and not even noticing them. The harm is negligible, the benefit is also negligible. This whole system with storms needs to be thoroughly reworked. In its current form, it is a fifth leg for a dog.

Seriously, what do people expect?

Of course storms need to be ignored and barely noticed.

Stuff like galactic storms and espionage shouldn't have been in the game in the first place, because however you rework it, they are always "something + random debuffs". The players keep asking for them because they are simply too immature to have the foresight that they will HATE unavoidable debuff mechanics with high impact randomness.

So they keep asking for any sci fi trope crap under the sun that sounds remotely cool "OMG please give us galactic storms like in Star Trek!! and espionage like in Star Wars!! and my planet randomly exploding like in Star Shoes! There could be a cool awesome situation for my home planet randomnly deciding to explode with deeply impactful fun choices! And give us space nomads!!!!"

 

[HighPriest]

*me at computer desk, playing fourth beta run to mid-game, getting frustrated by dozens of broken elements, questionable design decisions, bad UI*
*look to side, at framed picture on desk*
*"Don't Know What You've Got (Till It's Gone)" begins playing during slow zoom on picture of myself and Building Slots, smiling and laughing at amusement park*
*me, uninstalling 3.99 beta to spend a few last precious moments with Building Slots*

In all seriousness, I did start writing a rather lengthy analysis, but it's really all been covered by others more thoroughly and eloquently than I can be bothered. I'm not convinced this is a good design change to begin with, which still needs significant implementation tweaking, and almost certainly won't be properly ready and properly play tested in the next month. I feel really bad for the DLC team, because they're gonna get savaged in Steam reviews.

 

[Ajacoba]

Seriously, what do people expect?

Of course storms need to be ignored and barely noticed.

Stuff like galactic storms and espionage shouldn't have been in the game in the first place, because however you rework it, they are always "something + random debuffs". The players keep asking for them because they are simply too immature to have the foresight that they will HATE unavoidable debuff mechanics with high impact randomness.

So they keep asking for any sci fi trope crap under the sun that sounds remotely cool "OMG please give us galactic storms like in Star Trek!! and espionage like in Star Wars!! and my planet randomly exploding like in Star Shoes! There could be a cool awesome situation for my home planet randomnly deciding to explode with deeply impactful fun choices! And give us space nomads!!!!"

let me remind you that devastation was the least of your issues
all other effects of storms will still apply on your colonies and ships
devastation merely was the most obvious thing to notice because it can lead to low stability and rebellions, while the other effects will just kill your economy for a few years and you will just think that you need to expand a bit more because economy fluctuates all the time

also espionage is great, being able to steal technology or favors is hella useful
it also adds realism when you don't automatically know everything that's going on in another empire and instead need to investigate first
and it helps slow down the aggressive expanse a bit because if you rush ahead into unknown empires they may have a better fleet than you and flip the table on you - in addition you would have no clue where their star bases and colonies are, which obviously complicates conquering those a fair bit XD
the early warning system for AIs planning to attack you is also useful, gives you time to bring your fleets into position and potentially avoid a war entirely

 

[Fullerton]

Hello Paradox devs . I enjoy your game Stellaris. I have also played some time in the open beta. I believe that there is now a higher level of opacity in building construction due to the different types of buildings in different zones. I believe it would be helpful if there was some visibility on what kinds of buildings can be built in which zones.

I have two suggestions that you are, naturally, free to regard or disregard.
A:
Limit every zone to only being able to construct buildings from certain categories (e.g. government, assembly, amenities, etc); and display the icons of those categories somewhere in the zone construction interface.

B:
Add a view to every building that shows what zones it can be built in.

Cheers!

 

[Marmelado]

... I'm just so tired of being negative, but I can't see any reason not to be.

Don't be hard on yourself. Vast majority of "negative" feedback about the beta is honest, constructive, well-researched, good faith, impersonal and tested criticism. It is not hate for the sake of hate, it is people pointing out problems before those problems could affect something they enjoy.

It is more concerning to read from people who approve of everything, don't question anything, complain about complaining and prioritize feelings of the design team over making sure the game would be in better shape (not talking about people who make genuine "positive" feedback).

 

[Technotopia]

Updated and resumed previous 3.99.6 game

• Armies can invade planets again! There still aren’t defenders, so ground combat is very easy.

Invasion doesn't work still. Do I need to start from the beginning?[/spoiler]

 

[ArcTan]

Another day, another report:

1. Pop growth feels a bit better but still abysmal compared to 3.X. I usually benchmark my runs and follow a strict set of rules to combat randomness and relay only on guarantee parameters. before it was DIFFICULT to stay under 100 empire size y30/35 and you had to strategize if you wanted to do that. Now I barely reach 100 in the same time.

1.1 I use empire size because pop count is a bit messy and also there's no way to compare pop growth between old pops and new strata segregated ones.

2. Likewise research is the lowest I've seen. Buildings and dedicated zones make very little of it, even when spamming it. One lab goes <2 research each.

2.1 Synthetic fertility starts at 50% crime and 38% stability needing obvious attention before constructing any additional labs, add the low science output and it makes it unplayable.

3. Faction spawn and adherence seems broken. On a fanatic materialist empire people refused to join mat. factions and when to a random one. A grand total of 240 pops for most of the 30 first years granting >1 unity. On the other hand individualist voidforge w/ parliamentary civic one starts w/ everyone on a faction for a whooping +105 unity y0. It doesn't feel intended.

3.3 Aut. empires seems to have a problem w/ factions, people going to other ethics, tanking council legitimacy at y11 to -50% speed.

4. Unemployment and planet relocation is mostly impossible: Resettle tab shows everyone unemployed, and it is only possible to move people in bulk (the whole strata at once). Also, the "current unemployment" icon on planets seem misleading and overall confusing.

5. Many special buildings do nothing. Storm theater open no jobs. Dedicated origins start without dedicated buildings, for example death cult empires start without sacrificial temples (by virtue of then needed to be placed on an unity zone?). Likewise necros start without a chamber of elevation (that's funny).

6. Many (vanilla) empires start with a food deficit (including catalytic of all things). Individualist voidforge start with an energy one. Broken shackles are poised to plain bankruptcy.

Then again, I like a lot the idea of the pop rework, but current implementation feels iffy. Also, this zone bussiness of scaling jobs by building then is great on paper but in the current iteration simply robs the players of agency. Capital gets fully developed more or less as quickly as before but has a lower cap on jobs and/or output.
Now you need more planets than before, its very complicated to have a healthy a well rounded economy on just guarantees.

Job sliders could use some work, fine tuning workers is more clicky than before. Also pop modifiers should be visible by default, not indirectly by job efficiency. Same on pop growth.

Do not despair, I think the rework has LOTS of potential, I'm here just to report some perceived issues.

Cheers!

​

 

[Ilab]

Don't be so insulting just because YOU liked it.

In 3.14, we have no way to use them within your own empire but multiple civics, techs, traits, or origins that depend on doing that to have any benefit. That's not good at all.

The theoretical way to play around them is devastation mitigation that doesn't actually stop it from building, which makes all of the buildings to attract and keep storms around a new player trap. It's just killing your own economy. You COULD repel them, but just repelling storms isn't interesting gameplay - it's an entire mechanic whose purpose is to avoid the mechanic, much like 3.14 trade collection, which makes removal the optimal choice.

I do somewhat regret not having ANY way to use them as a kind of subtle sabotage, but it's too strong and too easy with no counterplay. Lock a Stardust Storm to gradually annihilate their economy with no way to counter the storm or detect the ship. What... "fun." Just having it for Nexus Storms MIGHT be doable, but it's probably too strong still. Devastation is just too strong a mechanic for it, as it was when CS released (which I said at the time, but here we are).

What is an insult there? Because I see absolutely no insult there. What seems to me is that you disagree and my mere opinion ins insulting to you.

Regarding your 2nd paragraph, it is just wrong. You can control storms in your territory very easily, you have an Ap that lets you spawn them for instance, and guess what? If you spawn them in specific places, then no other storm can spawn nearby as storms dont spawn next to each other. You dont even have to keep the ship there sutaining the storm if you prepared beforehand and didnt leave an 'escape' route for the storm and it will just sit there for the entire duration. So yeah, my point stands, a lot of people dont know enough about storms. I have had games where I have not been hit but more than 1 random storm that I didn't want, and it is the first which you actually want so you can unlock some tech. Ah, and I had 0 civics nor the origin for storms, I was riftworld origin, can share the save if you are not interested, or a couple more.

If people that do not understand storms actually tried to understand them they would see a lot of possibilities open up for them, but no, flooding every post (here in the forums, reddit, etc) with they are bad instead of trying to learn something is what has led to this entire sense that you cant do anything about them except repel them. It is wrong.

And, in any case, even IF it was right, so, we dont want adverse events? We want to play a game where absolutely nothing bad can happen, we want to stomp the AI etc. Everytime PDx adds some 'flavorful' mechanic that ruins ppls 'perfect' gameplay ppl complain and whosh, gone for all. Not to mention that the entire repelling/attracting buildings are in fact good as they are equivalent to a research lab in terms of production...

If anything, this removal should be a toggle, you dont like the meager 0.2 devastation per month that a storm will cause in an entirely undefended world? (And yeah, that is right, it is 0.2 per month with absolutely no protection, that is 24% devastation in 10 years, again with no protection, I already did the math for all storms and is on a post, you can actually have storms lingering for about 50 years with protection and it would still be positive for a planet production wise.) Then you go to the game settings and disable it.

Not to mention the entire potential they have to mess with others, the 100% damage risks are great to force bigger loses in battles, the devastation can screw up certain worlds in unison with the debuffs they add, you can spawn a storm somewhere and make sure that no other storm spawns or goes there, for isntance in an arc system. So yeah, there are lots of things you can as subtle sabotage. Mind you, not only they have severe debuffs increased fleet upkeep can sink an economy if used correctly for isntance, reducing output of certain jobs etc. And even if no storm can be used at a certain point, then at least you can make sure that worst storms travel a certain route by placing them in key spots. Again, your comment proves ythat you dont know how to use them, storms are currently almost THE ONLY THING you can use to sabotage other nations without direct conflict, in fact, it is better than espionage at that by miles.

Yeah, the stardust storm is an example of reking someone because of how it interacts with cloak, but that can be fixed by changing that storm type specifically. And the enxus storm, well, again, apparently people dont like to change the game in anyway, so having to move a scientist somewhere for a while or create some shields is such a 'Oh no, my game is ruined' moment.Again, ppl just dont want anything negative. The nexus storm at year 10 was a problem, yes, but it was changed, nexus storms now, when they appear, are usually not that big of a deal if you ACTUALLY do something, it is just that people dont want to do anything and have the buff with no counterplay... 'How fun'...

 

[Critical Ethics]

What is an insult there?

Or is it removed because some have put 0 effort to learn the mechanics

 

[grommile]

And the thing is, this doesn’t really feel like a beta test anymore, but rather like sticking to an idea no matter what, even when the fundamentals are being criticized.

So, a beta test.

If you push something as an open beta, you're saying that the fundamental design decisions are made, and you're looking for balance, bugs, and UI/UX issues.

Mechanically, both the pop numbers rescale and the general concept of Districts-Zones-Buildings are a done deal.

Ironically, the customer protection policy Steam recently implemented, where season passes have to say what you're getting and when it's due, may actually be hurting here.

 

[Upstream505]

I will mention again what I said in the previous beta topic. Please whatever else you do focus on performance. This is the make it or break it issue with Stellaris and has been for years. No matter how good the new features you add may be it means little when the game still performs this badly. The whole reason I was interested in this version of the game was the promise that with the removal of costly systems, like pops and hyperlane trade, systems I did like btw, Stellaris would finally perform well. Yet despite the removal/redesign of those systems being present already in he beta, the beta's current performance is simply terrible.

Please don't let performance be an afterthought. Delivering on performance should be the highest and most important priority. It should be sth that never leaves your focus.

The thing is, the performance isn't going to change in the beta because they are still testing the systems, it is not multuthreaded yet - to allow them to more easily test. Once they are finished and the proper update comes out, the performance improvements will show. They did say this in one dev diary

 

[fourteenfour]

Just very disappointed that we do not have functional gestalt empires to test. Yes I saw the script to kind of sort of fix a hive empire but given how much has not been tested by players we are stuck with very poor expectations given the progress of the beta.

 

[Newbee53]

Updated and resumed previous 3.99.6 game



Invasion doesn't work still. Do I need to start from the beginning?[/spoiler]

Yup. Its a beta and thus even less likely for saves to be compatible across versions than normal.

2.1 Synthetic fertility starts at 50% crime and 38% stability needing obvious attention before constructing any additional labs, add the low science output and it makes it unplayable.

This is not the problem I had with Synthetic Fertility. I wonder what the difference was. In my attempt at that play, new personalities were not added to the mind vault thingy. So I wasn't getting the escalating research you kind of need for that.

6. Many (vanilla) empires start with a food deficit (including catalytic of all things). Individualist voidforge start with an energy one. Broken shackles are poised to plain bankruptcy.

Broken Shackles was stated to be 'hilariously broken' when the first beta release was made. I've seen no evedence they've even tried to fix it. Also, DLC content was always said to be among the last things they were going to work on balance wise.

The food deficit for vanilla empires is kind of annoying, but from what I've seen its never more than -5 or -6 so shouldn't be hard to balance. As for catalytic, I'm guessing they've not gone through start variations for that civic.

As for the storms. I don't mind the removal of devastation from cosmic storms because it was a very boring modifier. I'd already reduced how common storms were in 3.14 because they were annoying--and on starburst galaxy I was getting hammered so often it never went away--but its not a huge change. I would be much more interested in tweaking the other effects to be stronger. so, the negative and positive effects were more interesting and stronger.

 

[CantGetNoSleep]

Well, it seems like galactic weather control is worthless now.

Good riddance

 

[NorseGod]

I'm still getting the Job-stuttering issue, as my Pops bounce back and forth between Technician and Farmer Jobs every day. These jobs should be evenly split by default, but now I gotta fiddle with the sliders or use job priorities which are pretty poor solutions. Not sure why we're still getting this issue so deep into the Beta.