Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

[Storyfag]

That Lithoids pack is gonna be cool.

Is this irony? Can't tell. $8 for background spreadsheet shenanigans and some pixel art work?

Look harder.
It will come with new mechanics for Lithoids.

The Age of Man is at an end.
The Age of the Silicoid has began.

Those new mechanics are shit. Give me proper species variety, with empires that flourish on toxic or barren worlds which I can't even colonize.

 

[Lyre Mors]

This has surely been asked before in the thread, but since there is a sale going on, which are the DLCs that make the game much better than vanilla? I haven't played since release because I was hoping they'd fix some things. What's the consensus around here?

 

[Lone Wolf]

Can't speak for everyone, but Synthetic Dawn, Utopia and Apocalypse are must haves.

Megacorp is nice to have, but optional. Same with Ancient Relics and the other story packs.

 

[Talby]

That Lithoids pack is gonna be cool.

It's gonna rock.

 

[Hellion]

They offered me a review code for Lithoids.

I mean, what is there to review, really. It adds rock aliens who eat minerals, plus 15-16 new portraits. Do you really need a reviewer to analyse that for you?

 

[Alienman]

I need some help with sectors! First time playing with the new systems, and I think I got how it works. So far all new planets have become part of my core sector, except one which was named Frontier Sector. But for some reason it's not showing up in the "Planets and sector" tab. Am I missing something here or is it a bug? The planet in question don't have a governor and I can't put anyone there since it's not showing up. Migrants from my core worlds seem to be going there though. Help!

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

They offered me a review code for Lithoids.

I mean, what is there to review, really. It adds rock aliens who eat minerals, plus 15-16 new portraits. Do you really need a reviewer to analyse that for you?

Rock it out, dude.

 

[IDtenT]

I need some help with sectors! First time playing with the new systems, and I think I got how it works. So far all new planets have become part of my core sector, except one which was named Frontier Sector. But for some reason it's not showing up in the "Planets and sector" tab. Am I missing something here or is it a bug? The planet in question don't have a governor and I can't put anyone there since it's not showing up. Migrants from my core worlds seem to be going there though. Help!

On the planet screen there is a button to add sector. Sectors are capital and four jumps from capital.

 

[Alienman]

Need help with another thing. This is not my system, I'm just helping out a dear pal. As you can see I'm trying to go from Feldazir to Ardqod, but I can't. I'm wondering is it because of the FTL inhibitor?
I took out their Starbase, but they still have troopers on the occupied planet. Is that enough for the FTL inhibitor to hinder me? If I send troopers there and reclaim the planet for UN, will I be able to travel then?

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Enemy Planets have inhibitors, through I don't remember if you need to have a fortress or if the main colony building comes with one packed in. You gotta invade, through I don't remember if simply bombing it hard enough (without going full Exterminatus, I mean) can fuck up the inhibitor.

Don't forget: Inhibitors come from tech, so in very early wars, you can pull tactics like skirting around the range of starbases and ignoring planets.

 

[Alienman]

Yeah, I checked the planet had a fortress. Sent a platoon of murderous assault robots across the galaxy, but the enemy surrendered before they got their time to feed on alien flesh.

I also noticed that, I was wondering what the point of starbases was before the inhibitor. Now I don't leave a system without building one

 

[Space Satan]

You either assault or bomb it to 2nd or 3rd stage of devastation when FTL stop working, look at the description

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Hi everyone!

I’m Eladrin, Game Designer on Stellaris, and I’m one of the newer members of the Stellaris team. I joined the team during the development of Ancient Relics, and it’s been a blast. It was awesome meeting so many of you at PDXCON, and getting to hear so many ideas and excellent stories directly from you.

Back in Diary 152 and Dev Diary 153, Grekulf mentioned some of the Summer Experimentation that we did - but in today’s dev diary I wanted to talk about one of the things I worked on during the summer - game mechanics for the Lithoids.


The Lithoids Species Pack is very sedimental to me. When I wanted to dig deeper into the systems and get my hands dirty in the code, I looked at the “wouldn’t it be cool if…” list, and saw “...Lithoids ate minerals instead of food?” up near the top. This seemed like a solid foundation to start with, and a gneiss stepping stone to get my feet on the ground that fit my apatite - it seemed like a pretty simple change after all.

Okay, I’ll stop with the rock puns.

There are fifteen Lithoid portraits (and one new machine portrait), some of which have appearances that resemble some of the other phenotypes so you can do some interesting things with Syncretic Evolution.

Look at me! I'm a sparkly space unicorn!

The ships use a beautiful asymmetrical crystal design. Remember that the colors of your ships reflect your flag. You can use this to your advantage to make a pretty sweet looking fleet.

This is my favorite Titan in the game.

There’s also a Lithoid Advisor Voice. I may have stopped with the puns for now, but there’s no force in the universe that can stop the Lithoid Advisor.

Changing the Lithoids to consume minerals was simple enough, but we also wanted to embrace the sci-fi trope of slow growing rock beings living in inhospitable climates. We started by giving them a massive boost to habitability which they still retain today, and a much larger pop growth penalty than they eventually ended up with. For flavor they receive a bonus to Army Health, and we increased their leader lifespans (but have their leaders start somewhat older as well).

Every little change leads to several more, however. If a species eats minerals instead of food, their homeworld should start with extra mining districts and no agricultural districts built. In fact, if a species evolved to eat rocks, their homeworld should probably by mineral rich and food poor. But wait, what about if they’re a Syncretic Evolution species, or if a Rogue Servitor wants to start with pet rocks? What about if they want to be a Devouring Swarm?

Many minor changes came along with what started as a simple economic change. Just a few examples include the Lithoids being tragically unable to be declared the most delicious species in the galaxy if there are any alternatives, loosening restrictions a bit on Bio-Reactors, modifying the Fleeting trait to be -25 years for Lithoids instead of -10, and a handful of Tradition changes. We also added a few Lithoid specific traits that allow them to generate small amounts of special resources every month.

After many rounds of qualitative feedback and a huge number of playdays, we ended up with the following as the Lithoid species trait:

The large habitability boost that Lithoids receive allow them to colonize worlds that would be marginal for other species, allowing them to work around their slower pop growth speed. Empires with a Lithoid primary species also begin with Lithoid Monolith blockers on their homeworld that can be removed at a large mineral cost for an additional Lithoid pop. (A Lithoid specific Origin in Federations modifies these a bit, and… we’ll talk more about that in another Dev Diary.)

So very sleepy.

The Lithoid trait is automatically applied to any species that uses a Lithoid portrait. For the Xenophiles out there, Half-Lithoids generated by Xeno-Compatibility follow this rule as well, so if the portrait is a Lithoid it will consume minerals instead of food, produce minerals when purged, and so on.

We’ve exposed this ability so modders should be able to similarly add phenotype forced traits to species they create by adding trait = "trait_lithoid" to the species class entry. (Replacing the Lithoid trait with their own custom species trait, of course.) I look forward to seeing what you do with it.

As for the Lithoid Devouring Swarm… They don’t have precisely the same motivations as a regular Devouring Swarm. While they will still press organics inhabiting the worlds they take into nutritive paste for the Bio-Reactors, their hunger is a bit more ambitious. Renamed Terravores, they operate largely the same way as a regular Devouring Swarm, but once off their homeworld they have an additional planetary decision to consume the habitable worlds of the galaxy, leaving devastated husks in their wake:

Are you going to eat that?

Terravores are barred from Terraforming (and thus do not have access to Hive Worlds) and cannot clear the devastation they leave behind, but other empires can clean up after them, though it takes a major effort.

Modders will now be able to change the name and description of a civic out for another based on species class, similar to how traditions can be swapped.

Species Class Civic Name/Description Swap

civic_hive_devouring_swarm = {

>snip existing stuff<

swap_type = {
name = civic_hive_devouring_swarm_lithoid
description = "civic_tooltip_devouring_swarm_lithoid_effects"

trigger = {
local_human_species_class = LITHOID
}}}

I’m quite pleased with how the Lithoids turned out, I think they're a real gem. I hope that you all enjoy it just as much.

In a few hours the free 2.5.0 patch will be up and the Lithoids Species Pack will be available for shale, so pick it up, rock out, and leave the galaxy gravelling at your feet!

Spoiler

#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.5.0 ############################
#################################################################

###################
# Balance
###################
* The Pop Growth Reduction for Bio-Trophies now actually reduces their growth rate. Driven Assimilators now apply their organic growth penalty as a multiplier the same way as Rogue Servitors do, and is now also 50%
* Defensive Platforms placed on Outposts now provide 2 points of Piracy Suppression for their system. The Great Game tradition from the Supremacy tree now also reduces the cost to build Defensive Platforms by 33%


###################
# UI
###################
* Shift+clicking on ship count in the Fleet Manager now adds ships up to the nearest unit of ten, using ctrl fills up to the template max size (for realzies this time)
* The Shared Burdens civic will no longer appear by itself in the civics list when you select Gestalt Consciousness ethics but have not yet selected Machine Intelligence or Hive Minded authority
* Added a notification when one empire guarantees the independence of another

###################
# AI
###################
* Automated building now checks that upkeep cost is covered by income

###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed wrong save file being loaded from the resume button in the launcher, caused by a conflict between local and cloud saves
* Fixed the game complaining about mods not being in UTF8-BOM3 for no good reason
* Fixed a potential crash in AI when evaluating market values
* Fixed cases where planetary events could fire multiple notifications
* Odd Factories no longer sometimes block pops from getting purged, because you monsters should be free to purge whatever you want
* Mod load order is now the same as the order in which the mods are displayed

Known Issue: Lithoids are currently affected like other biological pops when there is a food deficit, instead of being upset by mineral deficits. They’re very empathetic.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

We Galactus Now

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

RPS made a post about the Origins

Posting here with no link BECAUSE FUCK RPS SJWs that why

In the new Stellaris expansion, you can turn your home planet into a bomb
Bad day for the squidmen

Nate Crowley

Reviews Editor

24th October 2019 / 8:00AM

One of my favourite tropes in Science Fiction is aliens whose cultures are built around some hangover from the time before they made it to the stars. Take the Kelpiens from Star Trek: Discovery, whose existence is dominated by the inbuilt anxiety that comes from having once been prey species. Or Iain M Banks’s Idirans, the “top monster on a whole planetful of monsters’”, who lived in peaceful isolation until an alien invasion nearly wiped them out, after which they became fixated on brutal galactic expansion.

There are millions of weird things that can happen in space, and it’s fascinating to speculate about what sort of long shadows these formative events might leave on the development of a spacefaring culture. But why speculate, when you can play it out yourself? That’s the promise of Stellaris: Federations, the synth-heavy 4X’s upcoming expansion, which will include no less than eighteen origin stories for its customisable cast of mushroom-folk, misery insects and triocular platypuses. And yes, one of them involves your homeworld blowing up almost immediately.


Stellaris: Federations also introduces these absolutely gigantic starship/fortresses called Juggernauts.

Of course, the component parts of the origins mechanic have been in the game for some time. Back in 2017’s Utopia update, Paradox added a bunch of specialisation options for empires called civics, and a small few of these described a species’ background and gave it associated traits. For example, choosing post-apocalyptic started you off on a tomb world, and made all of your citizens well hard because they’d already brushed off a nuclear war or two, and probably ate raw dogs for breakfast.

The problem was, you could only choose two civics at the start of the game, and only four of those available had to do with your society’s background. A lot of the time, you wouldn’t end up with any sort of quirky background pick at all, because you’d be too keen to load up on other civics such as the tech-rush friendly Technocracy. More frustrating still, because some types of empires (such as gestalts and megacorps) started with hardcoded, unique civics of their own, they were unable to choose background civics at all.

As is so often the case with Stellaris if you turn your back on it for five minutes, that’s all changed now.

The four background civics have been promoted to origins, and joined by up to fourteen entirely new entries. I say “up to” because, while I’ve got details on six of of them and an idea of two more (that’s eight, if you hate maths), the remaining six of the promised eighteen are a mystery. And yes, that’s eighteen in total – a dev blog in September mentioned sixteen, but now we’re up two, apparently, and there’s a possibility more will be added before launch.

An empire can choose one origin alone at the start of the game, and can’t change it (unless of course time travel is added to the game – which let’s face it, it probably will be at some point).



So, what’s new at the zoo?

Well, first there are the four previous background civics: syncretic evolution, post-apocalyptic, mechanist and life-seeded. These are all origins now.

Then I’m told there are two origins relating to two of the federation types in the new expansion, where the player starts as part of a small, local federation. The five new federation types are Galactic Union, Trade League, Martial Alliance, The Research One Whose Name I Didn’t Write Down, and Hegemony. This is a bit of fun guesswork, but for maximum contrast, I’m assuming the origins will apply to Galactic Union (the nice one), and Hegemony (the mean one). That makes six so far.


Look at this poor bastard from the Stellaris: Federations trailer. Bet he has to go everywhere with that bloody frog, and he *hates* him. You can almost feel the contempt radiating from his face.

Seventh is Remnants, where you start on a relic world, and can send pops (that’s population units, not your dad) to work on dig sites, where they can uncover “the past glory of your ancestors”. Sounds like an interesting pick for tech-focused empires looking for rapid advancement, perhaps?

Eighth is Tree of Life, or “the Avatar one”, where you start with a powerful, civilisation-buffing gigatree on your homeworld, and must protect it at all costs. If cigar-chomping humans busticate your big plant, you’ll experience a heavy penalty.

Ninth is Void Dwellers, where you start on a habitat orbiting your pulverised homeworld. It’s not all bad news though, as your people will get a bonus to living in habitats, and will be able to build them earlier and more cheaply than anyone else.

Tenth is Shattered Ring, which either involves waking up the morning after consuming a hideously powerful vindaloo, or a species living on the last intact segment of a vast, ruined ringworld. If the latter is true, you’ll be able to gradually repair the rest of the megastructure as the game goes on.


Finally, you can have hive-minds that are life-seeded! Mechanist megacorps!

Eleventh is Scion, in which you begin the game as a vassal of one of the dreaded Fallen Empires, and have unique interactions with your ancient masters. This one has the potential to get brilliantly dramatic, depending on the type of empire you’re shackled to – Militant Isolationists, anyone?

The twelfth (and best) origin is DOOMSDAY, mentioned up top, where you begin on a planet that will explode in exactly 64 years. Oh, and there’s no guarantee that there’s a habitable planet in range for settlement during that time. Apart from anything else, if you start the game with a doomsday empire as your neighbour, you can expect things to get pretty bananas pretty quickly. Paradox have not yet confirmed whether your doomed homeworld can eject a single child refugee to become a superhero elsewhere in the galaxy.

That’s twelve out of eighteen. So what about the remaining six?

You may also like…

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We can probably presume there will be a vanilla origin option, with a completely ordinary start, for players who think milk is spicy. Then, there’s something called Prosperous Unification, which we can see a button for on the aforementioned dev blog, but know little else about.

Beyond those, the last four origins are a mystery. It may be the case that they’re already known as non-background civics that have been modified slightly to become origins, or they could be even stranger than the ones revealed already. Either way, the origins so far seem to present a huge variety of difficulty conditions and incentives for different playstyles, and I think they’re going to make for some classically weird Stellaris stories.

 

[IDtenT]

Hi everyone!

I’m Eladrin, Game Designer on Stellaris, and I’m one of the newer members of the Stellaris team.

Why are you hiring out of the Amazon?

 

[Lone Wolf]

2.5? Will this fuck mods again? Fuuuuuuuck.

 

[Goliath]

RPS made a post about the Origins

Posting here with no link BECAUSE FUCK RPS SJWs that why

In the new Stellaris expansion, you can turn your home planet into a bomb
Bad day for the squidmen

Nate Crowley

Reviews Editor

24th October 2019 / 8:00AM

One of my favourite tropes in Science Fiction is aliens whose cultures are built around some hangover from the time before they made it to the stars. Take the Kelpiens from Star Trek: Discovery, whose existence is dominated by the inbuilt anxiety that comes from having once been prey species. Or Iain M Banks’s Idirans, the “top monster on a whole planetful of monsters’”, who lived in peaceful isolation until an alien invasion nearly wiped them out, after which they became fixated on brutal galactic expansion.

There are millions of weird things that can happen in space, and it’s fascinating to speculate about what sort of long shadows these formative events might leave on the development of a spacefaring culture. But why speculate, when you can play it out yourself? That’s the promise of Stellaris: Federations, the synth-heavy 4X’s upcoming expansion, which will include no less than eighteen origin stories for its customisable cast of mushroom-folk, misery insects and triocular platypuses. And yes, one of them involves your homeworld blowing up almost immediately.


Stellaris: Federations also introduces these absolutely gigantic starship/fortresses called Juggernauts.

Of course, the component parts of the origins mechanic have been in the game for some time. Back in 2017’s Utopia update, Paradox added a bunch of specialisation options for empires called civics, and a small few of these described a species’ background and gave it associated traits. For example, choosing post-apocalyptic started you off on a tomb world, and made all of your citizens well hard because they’d already brushed off a nuclear war or two, and probably ate raw dogs for breakfast.

The problem was, you could only choose two civics at the start of the game, and only four of those available had to do with your society’s background. A lot of the time, you wouldn’t end up with any sort of quirky background pick at all, because you’d be too keen to load up on other civics such as the tech-rush friendly Technocracy. More frustrating still, because some types of empires (such as gestalts and megacorps) started with hardcoded, unique civics of their own, they were unable to choose background civics at all.

As is so often the case with Stellaris if you turn your back on it for five minutes, that’s all changed now.

The four background civics have been promoted to origins, and joined by up to fourteen entirely new entries. I say “up to” because, while I’ve got details on six of of them and an idea of two more (that’s eight, if you hate maths), the remaining six of the promised eighteen are a mystery. And yes, that’s eighteen in total – a dev blog in September mentioned sixteen, but now we’re up two, apparently, and there’s a possibility more will be added before launch.

An empire can choose one origin alone at the start of the game, and can’t change it (unless of course time travel is added to the game – which let’s face it, it probably will be at some point).



So, what’s new at the zoo?

Well, first there are the four previous background civics: syncretic evolution, post-apocalyptic, mechanist and life-seeded. These are all origins now.

Then I’m told there are two origins relating to two of the federation types in the new expansion, where the player starts as part of a small, local federation. The five new federation types are Galactic Union, Trade League, Martial Alliance, The Research One Whose Name I Didn’t Write Down, and Hegemony. This is a bit of fun guesswork, but for maximum contrast, I’m assuming the origins will apply to Galactic Union (the nice one), and Hegemony (the mean one). That makes six so far.


Look at this poor bastard from the Stellaris: Federations trailer. Bet he has to go everywhere with that bloody frog, and he *hates* him. You can almost feel the contempt radiating from his face.

Seventh is Remnants, where you start on a relic world, and can send pops (that’s population units, not your dad) to work on dig sites, where they can uncover “the past glory of your ancestors”. Sounds like an interesting pick for tech-focused empires looking for rapid advancement, perhaps?

Eighth is Tree of Life, or “the Avatar one”, where you start with a powerful, civilisation-buffing gigatree on your homeworld, and must protect it at all costs. If cigar-chomping humans busticate your big plant, you’ll experience a heavy penalty.

Ninth is Void Dwellers, where you start on a habitat orbiting your pulverised homeworld. It’s not all bad news though, as your people will get a bonus to living in habitats, and will be able to build them earlier and more cheaply than anyone else.

Tenth is Shattered Ring, which either involves waking up the morning after consuming a hideously powerful vindaloo, or a species living on the last intact segment of a vast, ruined ringworld. If the latter is true, you’ll be able to gradually repair the rest of the megastructure as the game goes on.


Finally, you can have hive-minds that are life-seeded! Mechanist megacorps!

Eleventh is Scion, in which you begin the game as a vassal of one of the dreaded Fallen Empires, and have unique interactions with your ancient masters. This one has the potential to get brilliantly dramatic, depending on the type of empire you’re shackled to – Militant Isolationists, anyone?

The twelfth (and best) origin is DOOMSDAY, mentioned up top, where you begin on a planet that will explode in exactly 64 years. Oh, and there’s no guarantee that there’s a habitable planet in range for settlement during that time. Apart from anything else, if you start the game with a doomsday empire as your neighbour, you can expect things to get pretty bananas pretty quickly. Paradox have not yet confirmed whether your doomed homeworld can eject a single child refugee to become a superhero elsewhere in the galaxy.

That’s twelve out of eighteen. So what about the remaining six?

You may also like…

Crusader Kings 3 is happening: here’s ten things we know so far

Crusader Kings 3 has been announced for 2020, and we've got the first details on what you can expect.

We can probably presume there will be a vanilla origin option, with a completely ordinary start, for players who think milk is spicy. Then, there’s something called Prosperous Unification, which we can see a button for on the aforementioned dev blog, but know little else about.

Beyond those, the last four origins are a mystery. It may be the case that they’re already known as non-background civics that have been modified slightly to become origins, or they could be even stranger than the ones revealed already. Either way, the origins so far seem to present a huge variety of difficulty conditions and incentives for different playstyles, and I think they’re going to make for some classically weird Stellaris stories.

Gotta say.. sounds great. I am really excited for this expansion. Can't wait for the release.

 

[Space Satan]

Starting on the Ringworld seems pretty OP. They earn you much more with unique districts

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

there’s no force in the universe that can stop

whoever says this instead of "no power in the 'verse can stop" deserves my utter contempt.

 

[Storyfag]

Starting on the Ringworld seems pretty OP. They earn you much more with unique districts

But. No minerals.

 

[Average Manatee]

Starting on the Ringworld seems pretty OP. They earn you much more with unique districts

They don't really earn you much more per pop, they just have a higher working pop cap. But then those districts also require rare resource which you very explicitly don't have and need substantial tech to get. From a balance perspective unless some changes are made the player who starts on a Ringworld is electing to be food for the nearby player who starts on anything else.

Have to wonder what the doomsday thing will give in terms of buffs. Has to be huge to offset that kind of penalty.

 

[Storyfag]

Starting on the Ringworld seems pretty OP. They earn you much more with unique districts

They don't really earn you much more per pop, they just have a higher working pop cap. But then those districts also require rare resource which you very explicitly don't have and need substantial tech to get. From a balance perspective unless some changes are made the player who starts on a Ringworld is electing to be food for the nearby player who starts on anything else.

Have to wonder what the doomsday thing will give in terms of buffs. Has to be huge to offset that kind of penalty.

TBH, for a ring to make sense as a starting location, you'd have to... extract alloys from the wreck? and replace minerals with alloys as far as constructing... about anything.

 

[Average Manatee]

Ringworlds make no sense as a place for civilization to develop, that was actually the whole plot of Ringworld. Once civilization fell its was impossible for a new one to arise. There was a bunch of old automated systems in various states of disrepair but no way for natives to make the massive jump between banging rocks together and space age super-materials without the intermediate stuff in between to learn from, which didn't exist.

 

[IDtenT]

Starting on the Ringworld seems pretty OP. They earn you much more with unique districts

Quite a few of the origins seem OP.