Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

use the auto build mod for the love of god

 

I actually do. But that's game's core concept for goodness sake.

 

Who would have known? In Switzerland even the Turks are greedy. The Swiss assimilated them pretty fast.

 

Devs:

 

Everything is expensive in Swiss land. When I hiked over from France I was surprised how big the difference was just after passing the border.

 

But seriously, that "Apocalypse" dlc sounds horribly underwhelming. For 20€ all we get is titan ships, doomsday weaponry, marauders and Khans (essentially a hybrid of enclave and Fallen Empire) and a few new ascension perks.

Those damn Swedes never excelled in the price-content ratio, but this is crazy. Especially since much of this stuff is available for free via mods. There's, for example, an excellent mercenary enclave mod which, with three exception of Khan, doubles everything the Marauders are doing and adds much more.

 

DD

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Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today, we continue talking about the Apocalypse expansion and 2.0 'Cherryh' update, on the topic of Ascension Perks and Civics. Please note that placeholder art is present for civic icons, and that is not how they will look on release.

Changed Ascension Perks (Cherryh Feature)
There will be a number of changes to existing Ascension Perks in the Cherryh update. As mentioned in Dev diary #94, all Utopia ascension perks except for the Ascension Paths, Habitats and Megastructures have been rolled into the base game, so with the exception of the changes to the Biological Ascension Path, these changes will affect everyone.

Interstellar Dominion: As of the result of a number of mechanics changes in Cherryh, including the removal of 'pushing borders' and the Border Range modifier, forcing us to replace this modifier with other effects. Rather than always replace it with the same modifier in each place, we made a number of different changes as we thought suited both the place the modifier was, and the overall balance of the game. Interstellar Dominion remains an ascension perk focused on expansion, giving -20% reduction on the Influence cost of both new Starbases and Claims.
Mastery of Nature: Mastery of Nature ended up being a bit of a weird perk. Originally, it was designed as only removing clear blocker cost, but this was obviously too weak, and so we buffed it by adding the automatic unlock of all blocker techs. This, in turn ended up being too strong, and so we tweaked it again by only having it remove half the clear blocker cost. What we ended up with was a very strong perk... but only if picked immediately as your first choice. In the end, we decided to go back to the drawing board and remake it into something that would be useful at any stage of the game and give an additional use for influence for empires not bent on expansion. The new Mastery of Nature, instead of giving blocker techs, instead unlocks a planetary edict that allows you to permanently increase the size of a planet. The Planet will have its number of tiles increased by 1-3, with the amount set based on the size of the planet, so a size 10 planet will always become a size 13 planet and so on. These new tiles will have randomly generated deposits.
World Shaper: World Shaper was another ascension perk with very situational uses. Instead of having it simply be a buff to terraforming, we've changed it to be a requirement to terraform Gaia worlds, and given Gaia worlds a bonus to overall resource production (though a lower one than Machine Worlds) instead of the happiness bonus it used to have. The idea behind this is both to make focusing on terraforming more of a distinct playstyle, and make Gaia worlds even more special.


Additionally, we also went back and further buffed the biological ascension path by making its special traits stronger, and in some cases, cheaper. We also plan to add more traits in general and give Robomodding another look-over, but this ended up being something we did not have time for in Cherryh.

New Ascension Perks (Cherryh and Apocalypse Feature)
We've also added several new ascension perks in both Cherryh and Apocalypse. They are as follows:

Eternal Vigilance: (Cherryh) Suited for the defensive player, Eternal Vigilance increases Starbase and Defense Platform Hull Points, and the Defense Platform Capacity of your Starbases, allowing for more potent static defenses.
Executive Vigor: (Cherryh) Executive Vigor gives +100% edict duration, allowing a player to keep more Edicts running at the same time without burning through all their influence. This also works on the new Unity Ambition edicts added in Apocalypse.
Nihilistic Acquisition: (Apocalypse) Nihilistic Acquisition is available to Gestalt Consciousnesses, Authoritarians and Xenophobes, and allows the use of the Raiding orbital bombardment stance, which will attempt to abduct pops to available tiles on your own planets instead of killing them, allowing you to steal the population of other empires to use as a labor force... or livestock/batteries, in the case of a Hive Mind or Machine Empire.
Enigmatic Engineering: (Apocalypse) For the secretive, tech-heavy player, Enigmatic Engineering makes reverse-engineering of your tech impossible, as your ships will no longer spawn any debris from battle. You also get a bonus to sensor range to represent your empire's obsession with knowledge.


As mentioned in Dev Diary #100, there is also a new Colossus Project ascension perk in Apocalypse that is required to design and build Colossi.

New Civics (Apocalypse Feature)
Finally, there's a few new civics in the Apocalypse expansion. They are as follows:

Post-Apocalyptic: Your empire was born in the aftermath of a nuclear war that devastated your homeworld. You start on a Tomb World with sparse resources, but your species has the Survivor trait, granting +10 leader lifespan and +70% tomb world habitability.
Life-Seeded: Your species evolved in a lush paradise possibly designed just for them. You start on a size 25 Gaia World, but with the Gaia World Preference trait that has 0% habitability on all non-'perfect' environments (Gaia Worlds, Habitats, Ringworlds).
Barbaric Despoilers: This civic unlocks immediate use of the raiding stance and a special Despoilation casus belli that allows you to declare war on any neighbor to seize their pops and resources. It requires a combination of Militarist and either Xenophobe or Authoritarian, and is not available to Xenophiles. Empires with this civic cannot take the Nihilistic Acquisition perk (as it would do nothing for them) and also cannot form Defensive Pacts or join Federations. Similar to Inwards Perfection and Purifiers, they get the Adaptability tradition tree instead of Diplomacy. They also get mild to moderate opinion penalties with certain ethics, such as Pacifists.


That's all for today! Next week we'll wrap up our Cherryh/Apocalypse dev diaries with a roundup of some minor features and QoL improvements coming in the Cherryh update. The week after that, full patch notes will be posted, and the week after that... is release day. See you soon!

 

I never took Mastery Of Nature anyway, but this new doesn't really seem worthwhile.
+3 slots on a 10+ planet? It's not nothing, but I don't think I'd have needed that very often.

Of course, it would work wonders for that famous 1 planet strategy

 

why would you even colonize a 10 slots planet? i never set foot ot anything lower than 20, given how every malus is calculated on pop and number of planets. and anyway i don't play without some planet expander mod.

 

Not at first, but at some point you are running out of larger ones (and at the same time your research is doing splendid, so not much is lost).

And the mantra is always: MORE.

 

MoN was OP as hell before, saving you thousands of resources per planet and letting you basically 100% ignore everything but physics research and rush for battleships/other things. Was literally the best choice in any game except stupid not-playing-the-game strats.

Getting 10-30% more production of everything per planet is huge (especially considering it's multiplicative rather than additive, compare to stuff like the +10% research perk which actually is worth more like +5% in practice). It will depend on how expensive the edict is, but for comparison a Habitat costs 5000 Minerals and 200ish influence for 12 slots (arguably a bit better slots though, so rate it at 15 or so).

Only idiots care about the research malus, minerals and energy decide the game. Not colonizing everything is just stupid.

 

To place it under governor, or use it as a part of war negotiations?

Wait are you actually trying to be ahead of research instead of grabbing it from wreckage of enemy ships?

 

The problem with Stellaris is when you have 100-200 planets, the micromanagement is a hellhole, because you are the ultimate commie alike central planner. There's no automation, there's no private market. In this regard Distant Worlds is better. Governors would be an answer if there was no cap on them, and they would have better AI. As it stands now its better to micromanage everything.

 

The individual pop/tile management on the planets was a major mistake. They should have simply abstracted it like sword of the stars or perhaps Endless Space 2.

 

Sadly instead of quickly making a Stellaris 2 they will spend 6 years churning out DLC.

It's interesting that both the Endless games and Stellaris are (at least compared to Civ) multiplayer-focused 4x games, but where Endless has a good streamlined set of Civ rules that are quick to play with, Stellaris goes the complete opposite direction and just forces you to give it all to sectors past a certain point to prevent players going insane.

 

That's because you have to deal with each planet individually and not just per each system.

It's a quite flawed game they will spend years trying to fix but you can't DLC your way out of bad game design.

 

Apparently Wiz admitted that he also considered the pop-tile system to be a mistake, so there's chance they will scrap it at some point. The example with FTL methods shos they are willing to scrap some basic concepts that turn out to be failures. There's hope.

Still, today's DD is an absolute travesty. They showed almost nothing that hasn't been done already by modders.

 

I haven't actually played ES, only EL, so I can only talk in generalities.

But in any case Stellaris rarely gives you more than 1 planet per system anyway, so that's not the problem. The problem is that most 4x games solve the "early game has nothing to do" problem by having interesting stuff on the game map to interact with. Once the early game ends these naturally fade away as the player begins to interact with the enemy empires. Stellaris has some of this (pirates, random event chains), but mostly fills the early game with autistic tile management, which instead of naturally fading away becomes a bloated monster mess as soon as you hit the double digit number of planets.

And you can't really just remove the tiles. All of the stuff like slavery, migration, and different ethics/traits/biomodding require tiles with individual pops on them. Removing tiles means a massive overhaul or removal of half the planetary management mechanics, which is why I find it highly doubtful that such a thing will happen outside of Stellaris 2.

 

100 planets is a mai-late game. On a huge map. And by that time 80% of that planets will be nder Sector control.
I never have to manage more than 10 planets and still I find it cumbersome in regards of constant monitoring of buildings being up to date, pop allocation. Mostly I use micro to place one slave on each planet to get domestic slavery bonus for my primary pure race.Or keep slaves as livestoc on food-producing tiles. That mostly takes a bit to micromanage resettlements but them I can ignore it until late game

 

i must be the only one... my larping powers make me enjoy moving people around. i have sweet thought of trains and camps.

 

Some new lists in 2.0

 

From devs

 

I really need to play a turbo-slaver campaign at some stage, having specific function slave species (most notably delicious livestock) could be quite fun (albeit probably rather exhausting due to needing to resettle slave pops all over).

 

Apparently in 2.0 it is possible to bypass Hyperlanes by using Jump Drives, but this applies a penalty to the fleet.





I'm guessing this doesn't apply to Fallen Empires.