Stellaris News

written by Guido

Hello and welcome to a new Dev Diary,

My name is Guido and today I’m here in my role as a Principal Designer on Stellaris to talk about AI in a bit more detail.

You probably have heard about the Custodian Initiative by now which has been created to keep improving the game on a more regular basis and in order to be quicker when reacting to player feedback. A part of this initiative is also to put some more love and attention to the AI of the game going forward - an AI initiative inside the Custodians, basically.

For this, we have set some goals for ourselves going forward:

1. Always work on AI-related topics, regardless of what else is going on
   
2. Move the AI towards being challenging to players in an entertaining way, rather than be optimized to min-max its way to victory
   
3. Move the AI towards being more distinctive, so that not all empires feel strong in the same way
   
4. Support future DLCs from the get-go
   
5. Constantly make small improvements to the AI
   
6. React quicker to player feedback
   
7. Occasionally make a push for more significant improvements

Speaking of which, for the upcoming patch in November, we have some significant updates in store.

[h3]Economic Script Update[/h3]

First of all, the biggest change you will notice is how we have changed the economic plans script. This script is the core of the economic behavior of our empires. It defines what resources they strive to get when building districts and buildings. How much population growth they should go for and how much research and unity they want.

The functionality of the script hasn’t changed much, but how we are using it has changed.

Previously the script was divided into early-, mid-and late-game. Depending on the phase of the game, empires would prioritize resources differently. For example, focus on research was lower in the early game than in the later stages of the game. However, this approach didn’t take into account the various situations an empire can find itself in. Especially after a war or when a new empire breaks off an existing one. In those cases, even if the game phase was in the late game, for the respective empires it meant that they were in a much more ‘early game’ position.



Instead of having 3 different economic plans, we feature 1 base plan instead. In order to get more flexibility and to react to the empire’s situation, we’re relying much more on the ‘subplans’ inside that base plan.

[h3]Improved economic subplans[/h3]

Subplans can be turned on or off, depending on the situation the empire finds itself in. Our main rationale was to ensure that an empire would be economically stable before it spends resources on ‘bonus’ things like research, population growth, defensive modules on starbases, and unity buildings.
Previously those things were prioritized too early and without enough respect to the basic income of energy and minerals, leading to empires that produced alloys, but had big deficits in energy and mineral production. And this deficit would be the start of an economic death spiral, where the resource debuffs would further reduce production and everything just escalated to the point where an empire was bankrupt on all resources. This became especially problematic after the economic system has been rebalanced to focus resource production more on the districts, rather than the buildings of a planet.

Here’s an example of what the economic situation generally looked for empires in a game that went on for around 80 years:
These are screenshots from Stellaris version 3.0.3

Our updated economic script prioritizes basic income first and takes the new economic rebalance into account. Energy and minerals are most important.

The difference between the ‘income’ and ‘focus’ block is that if the monthly income is below what is defined in the ‘focus’ block - districts and buildings which produce those resources get an extra bonus in weight, when deciding what to build.



Then the first subplan kicks in. If a country uses food (therefore, Machine empires will have this subplan turned off) it will prioritize food production.



The next subplan will check conditions for focusing on consumer goods. Again, checking if the empire actually uses them or not - and then only focus on producing them if the empire has at least a monthly income of minerals of 30.
Based on the fact that in order to create consumer goods you require minerals.



Further down we activate the plans for prioritizing research and all the higher-level resources



[h3]Resulting behavior improvements[/h3]

So, the script can check for various situations in AI empires - from the fact if they are a Gestalt Empire, using food to monthly income of specific resources.
This gives the AI a lot more flexibility in managing its economy.

As an example, here we have a 100-year old Galaxy with 13 AIs and every empire is able to manage its economy in a decent enough way. Notice the resource tab at the top - almost all empires have positive income in all resources; the ones with a negative income only have a small deficit:



Apart from this, there were some small, but significant code changes that helped the AI in running the show.

[h3]Conclusion[/h3]

The code for the AI has been optimized heavily in the past in order to improve performance a lot. However, this has led to some unforeseen and unintended behaviors which have now been corrected. Some of the districts and buildings weren’t considered at all and city districts were weighted way too high. The AI is also now able to build temples and holo theaters, for example.

Finally, the AI has also been given a bit of support in how it will set up its starbases, especially in conjunction with the hydroponics starbase building, which can play a larger role in how you provide food for your empire. The AIs can now use more varied setups when building their starbases, making use of Curator Think Tanks, Nebula Refineries, and other special buildings where it makes sense.

And all of this was built on the foundation of the last major rework of the economic AI, so kudos to sidestep for making this evolutionary step possible.

With your help, we’re looking forward to giving the AI the attention it deserves and making it even better in the future.

Cheers,

Guido

written by grekulf

Hello everyone!

Today I thought we’d go back and talk a bit about the Custodian Initiative and what the future can hold.

The 3.1 ‘Lem’ Update which we put out about 2 weeks ago contained a lot of good stuff that we'd been working on for some months. We’re really happy with how you have received the Custodian Initiative and the first free update, so it’s really fun to see that things seem to be moving in a clearly positive direction.

[h3]The Custodian Initiative[/h3]

With the Custodian Initiative we’re doing a lot of new things at once, and in combination with a lot of internal changes as well, means we’re still learning and adapting. One goal that we haven’t been able to quite deploy a solution for is how to better work together with everyone in the community. We very much appreciate your feedback and we like to have constructive or fun interactions with you, and we want to figure out how to make this process more effective for us. For example, we’ve been thinking about how to have more public-facing bug tracking where you could potentially vote for issues (the voting functionality currently exists in our bug forums, albeit a bit more hidden than would be ideal). None of this has any concrete plans right now, but I thought it was important to mention anyway, so that you can more clearly know that we’re very interested in figuring out how to better make use of community engagement and feedback.

If you have any thoughts, let us know! We are also interested in hearing if you have ideas on how you can organize yourselves in the community to promote ideas, bugs and suggestions for improvements.

Our primary ways of interacting with you are our forums, steam, reddit and discord.

[h3]Future Custodian Updates[/h3]

As we’ve mentioned before, we aim to release a new free update about every 3 months. These updates will sometimes be released together with a new DLC. The next update is scheduled for late November.

In the November 3.2 update, our strategy will be to be a bit less ambitious than the Lem Update, and to focus on a bit more safe improvements. Going forwards, we may alternate between safe and more spicy changes for these free updates. Even if we aim to make 3.2 a bit safer, there will still be some interesting changes to look forward to – like pretty significant improvements for the AI. We will talk a bit more about that in detail next week. We will talk more about 3.2 in the coming weeks after that as well.

After 3.2 we will be aiming to release a 3.3 update sometime in February. This update will be a bit more spicy. Among other things, the Unity & Sprawl rework, mentioned earlier in dev diary 215, is likely to be finished and tested by then. Given the spiciness of these changes, we’re also looking into the possibility of an Open Beta for them to help things go as smoothly as possible :) We will be talking more about that in the coming months, mainly after November.

Keep in mind that the Custodian Initiative is still in its infancy and things are prone to change, so try to be patient with what you can expect with future updates. Together we'll be able to make Stellaris even more awesome!

---------

That is all for this week! Next week we will be back to talk about AI improvements for the upcoming 3.2 update.

Hello everyone!

As we work on the next patch with the Custodian team, we thought that there were a couple of issues that have been brought up by you all that we thought needed to be addressed a bit sooner than the next Custodian patch. Nothing has changed since the changelogs were posted in last weeks Dev Diary.

[h3]3.1.2 Patch Notes:[/h3]
[expand]
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 3.1.2 ###########################
#################################################################

######################
# Performance and Stability
######################

* Fixed a crash where releasing a vassal as a Clone Army could cause an invalid species.

######################
# Bugfixes
######################

* Fixed the Clone Army origin tooltip not having a matching ship upkeep reduction with their admirals. Also changed the bonus to scale in a cleaner way, the upkeep is now 5/10/20% based on the Army's decisions.
* The Genetic Crossroads special project will now abort if a species completes Synthetic Evolution before finishing it.
* Fixed habitability of planets that clone armies have abandoned through lack of clone vats being locked at 0% for them.
* Ancient Clone Vats can now only assemble Clone Soldier pops.
* Going into a food deficit when using the Catalytic Processing civic will now give a -50% production penalty to alloy production. This penalty is in line with the penalty non-catalytic empires suffer from a mineral deficit
* Fixed players being able to move their Science Ship to blow up systems using the “Elder One” event.
* Fixed exploit where AI acceptance from Eminent Diplomats tradition also applied to trade deals.

######################
# Known Issues
######################

* The penalty to alloy production from a food deficit in catalytic empires is not shown in the deficit tooltip.
* Mastercraft Inc. Civic does not change Artisans into Artificers on an Ecumenopolis.
* Some inconsistencies in the number of jobs exchanged by Foundry Station designation for empires with the Catalytic processing civic.
* It’s possible for the Nivlac species to be created without the Radiotrophic trait in certain instances.
* Party Aftermath event can create crossbreed species between caravaneers and an infertile clone pop.
* Shattered Ring World can turn into a planet due to takeover or devastation.
* Mechanical pops with a Decadent Lifestyle have no pop upkeep.
* Awakened Empires don't use traditions properly.
* Machine empires can spawn with the necrophage origin.
[/expand]

We hope you appreciate our continued effort in improving Stellaris, and thank you for your feedback!