Stellaris News

Hi everyone!

Thanks for the tremendous participation within the 3.0.3 beta branch and for all of the feedback that you've been providing.

For those that are interested in joining the beta, you have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.

This week we'll be talking about some more changes that we're planning on pushing in the near future to the 3.0.3 beta branch concerning further balance updates, AI, and more. These are highlights of some of the things that will be in the full patch notes and not intended to be a comprehensive list.

[h3]Bug Fixes and Further Balance Updates[/h3]

From fixes to the end of the Cybrex precursor chain to correcting edict deactivation costs, we've fixed a number of issues that you've found and reported during the beta. Thank you for reporting things in the Bug Reports forum.

Regarding the economic changes, one of the common themes in the feedback has been that the sheer number of jobs in the game are too high, and we agree. Clerks are especially notorious for this, since in many cases you would rather actually see them unemployed and moving to a more valuable position elsewhere in the empire. We're taking some preliminary steps to reduce the number of jobs and changing things to focus on increasing productivity instead.

Here are some of the changes you'll be seeing soon:

• [Balance] Reduced the number of Clerk jobs provided by buildings and districts by 40%.
  
• [Balance] Clerk trade value has been increased to 4.
  

• [Balance] Buildings that increased basic resource production and added jobs to basic resource producing buildings or districts (Energy Grids, Mineral Purification Plants, etc.) now increase the base production of the relevant jobs by 1 or 2 based on tier instead of their previous modifiers. Machine empires still gain the extra resource district slots as before.
  

Yes, "Livestock" counts as a "Food producing job". (Or minerals, for Lithoids.)

• [Balance] Manufacturing focus buildings (factories and foundries) no longer prevent the other from being built on non-Ecumenopolis planets, and no longer add jobs to Industrial Districts. They instead increase the base production of alloy or consumer goods producing jobs by 1 or 2, with a corresponding increase in upkeep.
  

Secondary resources like Alloys do require more inputs to produce more, however.

Balancing the number of jobs and their output will be an ongoing task, expect future updates to have additional changes.

[h3]AI Updates[/h3]

We're making some updates that will have significant changes to AI behavior that should improve the effectiveness of AI opponents, as well as some changes to reduce the impact to your empire if an AI were to take control of your empire for a short duration in multiplayer.

These changes give the AI a greater focus on economic stability and improves some research related behaviors, but are also a work in progress and will continue to be updated in future patches.

We'll put up a 3.0.3 AI Feedback thread once it's live so you can let us know how you feel about these changes.
[h3]
Population Growth[/h3]

We're continuing to make adjustments to the current population growth systems in the game, and are exploring additional changes. Some of these are longer term initiatives, however, so in the meantime we're currently adding a quality of life feature that many people have been asking for.


Logistic Growth and Growth Required Sliders in Galaxy Configuration

These sliders will allow you to adjust the variables related to the bonus a planet can provide through logistic growth and the amount that pop growth increases per empire pop using sliders in Galaxy Configuration instead of needing to edit defines or use a mod to do so. Please note that these sliders can have major impacts on both performance and balance. Existing saves will use the default values. (Which can themselves be overridden in defines.)

Non-English localization for these changes will not be available in the beta as soon as the changes are up, but will be added shortly afterward. Apologies for the delay!

That's all for this week. Since we're currently in a post-release cadence (as well as next Thursday being a holiday in Sweden), the next Dev Diary will be two weeks from now on the 20th of May.

See you then!

Hello Stellaris Community!

We’re pleased to announce the Stellaris 3.0.3 Open Beta is Now Live. This open beta includes changes to the new population growth system introduced in 3.0.1, to address some of the concerns raised by players about the population growth mid to late game.

To opt-in to the open beta branch, right click Stellaris, click Properties, Beta tab, and choose “Stellaris_test” from the drop down.

Please leave your feedback on these new changes in the the Pop Growth Feedback Megathread here

We are always looking for feedback from our Community, and regularly incorporate community feedback into our future development plans.

We hope you’re enjoying Nemesis, and thank you for your patience while we further refine pop growth.

Hello Stellaris Community!

We’ve seen a number of your reports regarding the pop growth mechanics included in the 3.0 Update. We’ve been reviewing this feedback, and including it in our post-launch support for 3.0.

Here’s how we’ve decided to handle it:
This week (date to be confirmed) we will be publishing an open beta that includes a revision of some of the population growth changes. The objective behind the changes introduced in the 3.0.3 Open Beta is to address some of the concerns raised by the community regarding mid and late game population growth.


When the open beta branch goes live, you can opt-in to the beta by right clicking Stellaris, click Properties, Beta tab, and choose “Stellaris_test” from the drop down.

We will do a further post when this branch becomes available. We are committed to gathering additional feedback and will consider incorporating this feedback into our development moving forward.

We hope you’re enjoying Nemesis, and thank you for your patience while we further refine pop growth.

Hello everyone!

We hope that you’ve all had a chance to enjoy the 3.0 ‘Dick’ Update and Nemesis. We’ve had a lot fun making it, and it's been really fun to see your reactions to all the new stuff!

We appreciate all the feedback and bug reports you have submitted, as it really helps us improve the game. 3.0.2 is looking to be quite stable as it currently stands, with better performance and a very low amount of out-of-syncs in multiplayer. There are still bugs and improvements that we want to make and the current plan is to fix bugs and make improvements for a couple of weeks more, until we can release a 3.0.3.

For that patch we’ll be looking at things like:

• Some improvements relating to Operations & Espionage
  
• Tweaking and making improvements related to pop growth
  
• Various other improvements, balance tweaks and bugs
  

We also know that pop growth has been a heartfelt issue for some of you, so we wanted to take this opportunity to address some of that feedback. With that I’ll hand the word over to our Game Designer Stephen to talk a bit more about pop growth in detail:

"The Stellaris 3.0 ‘Dick’ update had a number of changes to economic systems, including major changes to population growth. We wanted to significantly reduce the number of pops in the galaxy and decrease the disparity of number of pops between empires with mass colonization and those with fewer focused planets, allowing smaller empires to keep pace to a degree with more sprawling empires. (The eternal struggle between wide and tall play.)

As part of this, we made some changes to increase economic output of individual pops or other sources through various means - some technologies were buffed, edicts were updated, and new bonuses were added to keep production up. Some secondary resources, such as Research, are intentionally more difficult to rush, since we believe that in 2.8 it was a bit too easy to reach repeatable technologies and technological dominance.

We do recognize that putting limitations on the previously endless growth can feel bad, and that the large number of sudden changes can be shocking. Internally, we’ve been playing with the system for months, and know that while it will take a transition period to get used to some of the changes, we believe that these changes are better for improving the long-term playing experience.

That said, months of internal testing pales in comparison to a week of live play, and the feedback we’ve received from you have been integral for us to continue to improve the playing experience and has led to some adjustments we want to make. Balancing complex systems are an ongoing process so we encourage you to continue feedbacking here on the forums as we move forward.

While we were interested in having more backwater planets in proportion to highly developed planets, we've deemed it too difficult to get to the higher infrastructure tiers. As such, we're planning on reducing the number of pops necessary to upgrade capital buildings to the higher tiers.

The growth on highly developed worlds also felt a little low, so we've increased the floor of how low logistic growth penalties can drop planetary growth, to make sure that these planets still produce a low but noticeable amount of growth. The effect on growth required from the number of pops in the empire was stagnating growth too early, so we're adjusting that value down as well. These should help make late game worlds like a Ring World or Ecumenopolis less difficult to populate, though you may still want to encourage your pops to resettle to them to get them going.

To ensure that other special planets such as the Hive World and Machine World still feel valuable when they come online, we've added assembly jobs to the planets themselves. (The Resource Consolidation origin will begin with a blocker negating this extra job until removed.)

Since colonization is taking longer than desired in the mid to late game, we've added Colony Development Speed bonuses to the civilian infrastructure technologies in addition to their Building Slots.

There's been a lot of positive feedback regarding the new automatic resettlement mechanics, so we're looking at changing the functionality of the Slave Processing Plant to expand automatic resettlement to slaves on the planet at a reduced rate instead of providing production bonuses. So much paperwork.

Constructobots have requested Building Slot parity with Functional Architecture, and we can yielded to their demands. The bio-trophies of the Rogue Servitors have also been shown some educational programs to help them multiply. And as a quality of life request from the Prosperously Unified, we're extending the duration of the homeworld buff to 20 years."

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Please note that this is not a comprehensive list of all the changes we’re looking into for 3.0.3, but rather some of the highlights.

That is all for this week folks! We hope you enjoy the game, and continue giving constructive feedback so that it’s easier for us to keep improving the game.

Please note that this is not a comprehensive list of all the changes we’re looking into for 3.0.3, but rather some of the highlights.

That is all for this week folks! We hope you enjoy the game, and continue giving constructive feedback so that it’s easier for us to keep improving the game.