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Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

Preben

Arcane
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Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Jan 18, 2017
Messages
3,821
Location
Failsaw, Failand
I have a rig that runs high-end games (should handle Cyberpunk 2077 with no problems) and Stellaris runs so slow that it is no longer fun past 2350 and is unplayable by 2400.

It has been already established that Stellaris performance problems are foremostly because of piss poor programming. The game recalculates insane amount of things each day and caches too little data. On top of that, UI is a complete resource hog.
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
I discovered why, for the longest time, I never really noticed this "endgame slowdown" effect, and that's because my playstyle accidentally avoided triggering it: I tended to aggressively micromanage to avoid open jobs, because I'd close them to force pops into desired roles, while exporting devastation and marauding to the rest of the galaxy, causing many destroyed buildings which resulted in unemployment rather than open jobs. This resulted in severe lag reduction at end-game.
 

Ibn Sina

Arbiter
Patron
Joined
Jul 12, 2017
Messages
921
Strap Yourselves In
So I guess its a safe bet to wait until the federation patch before installing again. I uninstalled the game because the late game lag was so unbearable that I was never able to complete a game. This and because there was absolutely zero challenge once you are past a certain threshold.
 
Joined
May 11, 2007
Messages
1,853,654
Location
Belém do Pará, Império do Brasil
I'm setting my eyes in this "Stellaris Immortal" mod I've heard about. Seems like they're doing some interesting ideas and it prioritizes increasing performance as well as making every decision and planet and building count for more.

Let's see how it goes when Federations hits.
 

Jimmious

Arcane
Patron
Joined
May 18, 2015
Messages
5,132
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Don't be lazy :P

Hello everyone!

Today we thought we’d talk about some of the smaller changes coming to diplomacy with the free 2.6 update. Although the Galactic Community and the reworked federations are sure to have a large impact on galactic diplomacy, it's also important to talk about the smaller things!

Envoys
One of the more important things we’ve added are the Envoys. Envoys function very similar to Diplomats in EU4, and they are required for certain diplomatic actions such as:
  • Improve / Harm Relations – it is now possible to send an Envoy to improve or harm relations which can affect Opinion by up to (-400 / +400 ). More on Opinion and Relations later.
  • Assigned to Federation (to increase monthly Cohesion by +1)
  • Assigned to Galactic Community (to increase Diplomatic Weight)


Although Envoys are characters, they do not currently have any character-mechanics such as traits. We didn’t think it would be fun to have to micromanage and switch Envoys around to better fit certain jobs depending on their traits.

Diplomacy Interface Updates
We’ve finally gotten around to give a bunch of diplomacy-related interfaces a facelift! First up, let’s talk a little about the general diplomacy screen.

You are now able to more clearly see things such as Civics, Origins, Relative Power breakdowns, your ongoing diplomatic agreements, and also the new diplomatic stances!

index.php

This Hegemonic subordinate was kind enough to act as a model for the new diplo screen!

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Declaring rivalry never looked so appealing.

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The diplomatic offers are now a bit more clear on what is going on (not final text). A downside, however, is that it's now much harder to fool colleagues into becoming your vassal in our internal multiplayer sessions.

Diplomatic Stances
Sometimes we like concept that our colleagues have put into some of our other games, and the diplomatic stances from Imperator: Rome were a good example. Although not exactly the same, we like the general idea. We wanted empires to be able to set a diplomatic stance that dictates their behaviour towards other empires on a galactic stage.

index.php


Diplomatic Stances are Policies and can be changed once every 10 years. There are a bunch of different stances, and some may also be unique to certain empire types (e.g. Isolationist is called Mercantile for Megacorporations).



Stances are designed to be quite different, and to facilitate different playstyles. Perceptive readers might notice that the Belligerent stance seems very similar to Supremacist, and that is true, except that Supremacist stance is designed for all empires that want to be “a big player”. Supremacist empires will dislike other empires with the same stance, so it is almost like a soft rivalry of sorts.

Stances also have some effect on internal politics, as some of your factions may have certain preferences when it comes to your foreign policy.

Relations and Opinion
We wanted an easier way to measure how the diplomatic relations between two empires is doing, so we’ve added a new aggregate value called Relations. Relations exists in different levels ranging from Terrible <- Tense <- Neutral -> Positive -> Excellent, and they do have an effect on which type of diplomatic actions that are available.

We want diplomacy to be less fickle, and more mechanical. Players should now have more ability to influence what other empires’ opinions are of them. Overall diplomacy should feel less static and more prone to evolving over time.

Form Federation requires Excellent Relations, and pacts like Migrations, Research or Commercial require Positive Relations. Similarly, Rivalries require Terrible Relations. This is also the case in player-to-player diplomacy, so it’s important to maintain a good standing.

Some of these restrictions can be bypassed by having an Envoy to harm or improve relations.

index.php


Favors
Finally we want to talk about Favors. Although Favors were primarily added to give players agency within the Galactic Community, they can also be used to influence the AIs likelihood of accepting certain diplomatic agreements.

index.php


Favors is a new mechanic that allows you to increase your Diplomatic Weight for certain votes or proposals in the Galactic Community. An empire can owe another empire up to 10 Favors, and each Favor will increase Diplomatic Weight by “10%”.

For example – Empire B owes 10 Favors to Empire A. Empire A spends influence to call in all 10 Favors and adds 100% of the Diplomatic Weight that Empire B has. Empire A will add the Diplomatic Weight from Empire B, for a specific vote, without Empire B losing their Diplomatic Weight.

In effect, Favors allows an empire to manipulate vote results towards their point of view. It is not possible to Call in Favors when an empire is already voting the same way as you are. Multiple empires can call in favors from the same empire, and it's designed in this way to reduce the complexity of having to figure out which favors should have priority, or which favors should matter more.

index.php

Pretty please. You owe me.

In addition to the Galactic Community, Favors can also be called in to increase acceptance chance by +5 when offering certain diplomatic deals.

Favors can be gained through diplomatic trades, or or some cases randomly through events.

---

That is all for this week! Next week we’ll be back with some more details on the Juggernaut and the Mega Shipyard.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,152
"diplomacy overhaul"

implements the improve relations/insult buttons from EU4, the favors from EU4, and the stances from Imperator

"That'll be $20 please"
 

Space Satan

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
6,216
Location
Space Hell
stop being lazy shit and post dd here, it takes copy paste only

Hello everyone!

Today we’ll be talking about some big stuff – namely the Juggernaut and the Mega Shipyard.

Both of these new behemoths are a part of the upcoming Federations expansion.

Juggernaut
Stellaris has been in development for many years and, and if there’s something we know for sure its that big ships are cool, and bigger ships are even cooler. With this flawless logic in mind, we obviously wanted to add something even bigger than a Titan.

Mobile starbases is something that we know has been widely requested, so why not hit two avians with one lithoid?

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Visually, the Juggernaut has the shape of a giant pair of wings.
The juggernaut is as much a mobile starbase as it is a massive warship. Although the Juggernaut works like a mobile starbase in some regards, it will not project borders or control ownership or systems. A Juggernaut instead functions like a forward base of operations during offensive campaigns, a place where you can repair your ships. The Juggernaut will not have starbase modules or buildings – instead it will count as always having 2 Shipyards (which means it can build, repair and upgrade ships).

index.php


The Juggernaut can be designed in the ship designer, and features 2 XL turrets, 6 hangar slots and 5 medium turrets.



In addition, the Juggernaut gets access to a couple of new and unique aura components.

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The Juggernaut will be unlocked by a technology which requires Citadels and Battleships to be already researched. A Starbase will also need to have a Colossal Assembly Yard in order to be able to construct one. The Colossal Assembly Yard is required for (and unlocked by) both the Colossus and the Juggernaut.


index.php


The Juggernaut will have an empire limit of 1.

Mega Shipyard
New Megastructures are always nice, because we all want more ways to show off the glory and magnificence of our empires. The Mega Shipyard is exactly what it is, a giant shipyard that allows you to build a lot of ships really fast.

index.php


The Mega Shipyard will also provide ships with +100 starting XP, so that it will not matter where you build them. Generally speaking, we are trying to avoid design that creates incentives for players to engage in more micromanagement that may not be fun. We believe the choice of where to build a ship (because it would cost less, or gain more XP somewhere) is an example of micromanagement that is not very fun. The only incentive is to avoid loss aversion, which is not a good. Incentives should generally be positive.

index.php


The Mega Shipyard is unlocked by a technology which requires Mega-Engineering (like the others). It’s found in the Society tree and belongs to the Military Theory category.

index.php


The Mega Shipyard will have 3 stages (in addition to construction site):
Mega Shipyard Framework
- 10 Shipyards, +33% Ship Build Speed, +100 Starting Ship XP
Mega Shipyard Core - 20 Shipyards, +66% Ship Build Speed, +100 Starting Ship XP
Mega Shipyard - 30 Shipyards, +100% Ship Build Speed, +100 Starting Ship XP

The bonuses to Ship Build Speed will be empire-wide.

Keep in mind that these numbers are work-in-progress and may change.

---

That is all for this week! Next week will be the last dev diary of the year, before the holidays, and we will be doing a round up of the year.

Also keep an eye on our social media channels, as we will be sharing some more screenshots of the Juggernaut and Mega Shipyard.
 

Jimmious

Arcane
Patron
Joined
May 18, 2015
Messages
5,132
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Hello everyone!

Christmas is fast approaching, and before the team disappears for some well-deserved rest, we thought it would be good to sum up the year and share some thoughts.

2019 has been a challenging year for us, with many different challenges that we’ve had to tackle. The year began with an extended period of patching, which had us starting on a bad footing. We had a lot of issues to address, but we also had plans for the year, plans that included small side projects as well as developing new content for the game.

The year made it clear that we need to slow down and refocus our efforts, because we’ve been running at a high pace for too long now. We are working hard with Federations to make sure we have time to address any outstanding issues, and to make the expansion a great release.

Our communication hasn’t been the best during the year either, and a lot comes down to us not having a lot to communicate (as we were busy working on things), and that we decided to use PDXCON for all our announcements. Next year we hope to be better, and as mentioned previously, we will be starting 2020 with a bunch of Q&A dev diaries related to different topics each week. The schedule for the Q&A will be posted next year, with our first dev diary on January 16th. Our plans for 2020 are looking very good, and we’re very excited for the future.

In dev diary #141 I outlined some of the concepts that I wanted to explore for the game. Let’s take a look at some of the things we’ve achieved:

  • Pop growth: Look into how immigration/emigration works, try to make base growth across multiple planets less powerful, make habitability matter more again
  • Sectors & automation: Allow players to nudge which sectors planets belong to, reduce micromanagement by improving sector management tool.
    A lot of work has been done with this, such as creating sectors, manual designations and planet automation. All work isn’t finished however, and we want to add more improvements.
  • Backgrounds: Split up some civics into backgrounds, and add more backgrounds.
    This is being implemented as Origins, and we’re very happy with how much value this adds to the game.
  • Civic flavour: Spend more time on making the civics feel more unique and fun.
    We’ve done some work towards this, but we don’t consider it finished yet. There are still a bunch of Civics we would like to make more fun.
  • Institutions: Define which institutions make up your empire’s internal departments (such as Diplomatic Corps, Xenology Bureau etc.), and their funding, size and power.
  • Espionage: Intel to determine how much you know about another empire, spy actions, cloaking, sabotage & general mischief.
  • Religion & Cults: Similar to factions, cults could appear in your empire during certain circumstances. Spiritualist empires would most likely have “imperial” cults. Worship of powerful entities etc.
  • Archaeology: Explore the ruins of ancient civilizations.
    We added Archaeology in Ancient Relics, and we’re very happy with how the system allows us to tell stories in chapters.
  • Subject contracts: Allow overlords to better customize what type of subjects they have, tribute levels, benefits to subject etc.
  • Federation depth: Allow federations to level up, have different election types, taxes etc.
    This will be done with the reworked Federation system coming with the 2.6 update next year.
  • Galactic Council: Create a sort of a ‘space UN’ with galactic politics and diplomacy.
    This will be done with the Galactic Community coming with the 2.6 update next year.
  • Primitives: Allow for more interactions with primitive pre-FTL species
With everything we’ve been working on during 2019, we will be adding a lot of depth and customization to Stellaris. We are especially looking forward to when you all get a chance to play with Origins and the Galactic Community.

And because we can’t have a dev diary without some sort of sneak peak, we will show you this:

index.php


The previous design that we outlined in dev diary #158 showed Strongest (Economy) and Diplomatic Weight as two succession types. We weren’t entirely happy with that, so we have separated the Strongest Succession Type from which category is used to determine who is the strongest. Setting Strongest as the Succession Type now requires High Centralization. The cool thing is that this now allows you to have a Research Cooperative federation that is led by whichever empire has the best technology.

Producer Switch
And now a message from @Jamor:

Hi all. Firstly, I want to wish you all a happy and safe holiday season. Play lots of video games, spend time with your loved ones, and start 2020 in the best style.

I became the producer (called Project Lead back then) of Stellaris back in February 2017. While I wasn’t new to the games industry, for me it was an amazing moment to finally work on the sort of hardcore, deeply nerdy strategy games that I myself played at home (having started with Paradox games in 2007 with HOI 2). I look back upon the starry-eyed character who wrote this, and reflect upon the journey so far: contributing to three full expansions, three story packs, and two species packs, seeing the title through absolutely massive changes, and all in all patching on 37 separate occasions - some great, some not so hot (I’m sure some of you remember the great dawning of galactic peace that arose from the 1.6 patch, by the simple expedient of making the AI actually incapable of declaring war). All in all it’s been the most intense and memorable era of my career in this crazy industry.

The only constant is change, however, so now I’m moving over as producer to Imperator: Rome. They are a great bunch of folks who are bringing out the immense potential of that game more and more, in the classic Paradox style. It is my honour to lead them forward as the game continues to grow and evolve.

Of course that means I’m leaving my beloved Stellaris team. After sharing so many experiences, some magic, some tragic, it is not without emotion that I do this. But ultimately, you cannot keep doing the same thing forever, and I’m eager to get started on this new challenge. I want to thank my guys, who have so fearlessly and loyally pushed on towards the objective no matter what. I also want to thank you, the fans, without whom there would be no Paradox, and as a fellow fan reaffirm my commitment that I’ll always do the best I can, on whatever team I’m in, to uphold our Special Secret Thing (™). We’re Paradox, we’re different from everyone else, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it. @Obidobi will take over leadership of the Stellaris team, and he has my complete confidence.

And now, I set down my laser, and gird on my gladius. LETS GO PDS!


A message from @Obidobi:

Hello everyone!

I'm Obidobi, some of you may have seen me around as I've been working at Paradox (and Stellaris for that matter) for the past 5 years. I started my journey as a newcomer to the gaming industry as a Paradox QA in 2014 where I saw Stellaris in its pre-alpha stage and I've been on this spaceship ever since. In 2018 I joined the producer team helping @Jamor on Stellaris and some other projects, including the Console Edition of Stellaris. Stellaris is basically running through my veins at this point, and I don't think I'll know what to do if I ever move projects. So as my dear mentor @Jamor leaves for more ancient lands, like any proper Shounen Protagonist, I will have to pick up the mantle of Hokage and become stronger than ever before (Look forward to these kinds of references).

I'm really looking forward to see where the team and I can take Stellaris going forward and I'm truly excited about getting an opportunity to hold the steering wheel. I hope you guys will accept me with open arms as you did with @Jamor!

I hope you’re all as excited as I am for the future, but for now I just want to wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year!

---

That is all for this week and the year! We will be back again on January 16th!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

index.php
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
Mega-Shipyard reminds me of how Space Empires IV allowed you to mount builder modules in space stations and even ships. I never used them in ships (you needed a huge one), but building orbital space yards in order to increase my production capacity early on was one of my favorite tricks.
Building orbital shipyards to increase ship production wasn't a TRICK, it was what you were SUPPOSED to do, there was even straight up a classification for them. Planetary production capability was AWFUL.
 

Nano

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 6, 2016
Messages
4,648
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
Goddammit, it's 5 AM. Somebody should've told me this game destroys your sleep schedule before I started playing it.
 

Jack Of Owls

Arcane
Joined
May 23, 2014
Messages
4,279
Location
Massachusettes
A little trick for people who don't want to use mods to make the tiny font at 1920x1080+ resolutions readable without mods -- set your Windows display at 125% or higher, then disable the DPI scaling in the game's exe (right click). The font is now noticeably larger without the fuzziness in the text that can occur with the game's built-in UI scaler or not using native resolutions on your display. It works for some other Windows games as well but not a lot.
 

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