Stellaris News

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Hi everyone!

Two big things this week.

The first is that 3.0.3 has moved from beta to live, with the full details available here. 3.0.3 includes numerous economic and AI adjustments, bugfixes, and two new sliders in galaxy generation to control pop growth behavior without the need for a mod.

The other is that PDXCon Remixed, an online adaptation of our annual convention, is kicking off!



We’ve had a variety of events including the Treasure Hunt and Grand Campaign (praise snek) over the past few weeks, but the main events start this weekend.

I’ll list a few of the events of particular interest to Stellaris players, but the entire schedule can be found here.

Friday, 21st of May:

• At 20:00 CEST, the Announcement Show will have all sorts of news and revelations, you can watch at twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive. (The pre-show event starts at 19:30!)
  

Saturday, 22nd of May:

• At 01:10, Product Marketing Manager Pontus Rundqvist will be hosting a talk called Fanatic Egalitarians: Bringing Stellaris to Consoles with our friends from Tantalus, Producer David Giles, Designer David Doe, and Programmer Adam Clarke.
  
• At 20:00, the Paradox Awards show will be held, honoring the best community in gaming. Modders, community organizers, content creators and more will be highlighted and awarded for their amazing work with all our games.
  

Sunday, 23rd of May:

• At 00:40, Community Ambassador Graeme “DJ Truthsayer” Crawford will host Defining Your Own Space: Making Great Stellaris Content, featuring some of the brightest stars of Stellaris content creation. ASpec, Enigmatic Rose, Old Man Mordaith, and Stefan Annon will give tips on making fun and engaging videos.
  
• At 02:10, DJ will continue with How to Conquer the Galaxy Without Really Trying, with QA Lead Joseph Gardener, Embedded QA Byron Aytoun, Regunes, UMAR, and Stefan Annon teaching you how to turn a fledgling empire into an intergalactic powerhouse!
  
• At 13:10, make first contact with some of the developers at Meet the Stars: Stellaris Dev Mingle on Discord.
  
• At 14:10, DJ will host Fanatic Xenophiles: Creating Character for Stellaris, featuring Senior Artist Frida Eriksson and Artist Emma Jonsson. See how our worlds are populated with a growing array of fascinating creatures.
  
• 14:55 brings us Fanatic Spiritualists: The Philosophy Behind Stellaris, where Live Content Producer Anders Carlsson grills Game Director Daniel Moregård, Content Designer Gemma Thomson, and myself (Game Designer Stephen Muray) about the stories being told through Stellaris, and how the game is designed to create those stories.
  
• At 15:45, the Fanatic Materialists: A Look at Stellaris Tech panel, featuring Tech Lead Lorenzo Berni, Senior Programmer Gustav Palmqvist, Content Designer and Technical Scripter Pierre Du Plessis, and Former Tech Lead Gwenael Tranvouez will share their insight on how the technology behind Stellaris is created.
  

That’s not all, see the full list of events here to plan your agenda, with more updates following the Announcement Show.

There'll also be a Stellaris Virtual LAN Party on the Stellaris Discord all weekend! Join to play Community hosted multiplayer games (competitive and roleplay games), learn to play Stellaris from experienced community members, win some game keys, and maybe a chance to Play with a Dev!

Enjoy the convention!

Hello Stellaris Community,

As promised, we have updated the 3.0.3 Open Beta to include the missing non-English localisations that were not included in last week’s update. The new and updated localisations are now included in the Open Beta.

Thank you for your patience and feedback!

Hello Stellaris Community!

We would like to start off by saying thank you to everyone for your patience and feedback on the 3.0.3 Open Beta! We received a great deal of feedback from the Community, and, as we said we would, we’ve incorporated this feedback into our development plans moving forward.

This open beta contains some missing and inaccurate localisations for non-English languages. These localisations are coming, but we feel it is important to get an updated beta out to our players for additional feedback as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience.

You can opt-in to the beta by right clicking Stellaris, click Properties, Beta tab, and choose “Stellaris_test” from the drop down.

One of the key pieces of feedback we received from the community was that the number of jobs was currently too high for the number of pops in the galaxy, and we agree. As such we have updated the job counts on a number of buildings and districts, including Clerks, Alloy Foundries and Consumer Goods plants. Higher tier foundries and consumer goods plants will now add flat bonuses to job output, rather than adding more jobs, they also are no longer mutually exclusive.

This update to the 3.0.3 beta also includes some major changes to AI behavior that should improve the effectiveness of AI opponents. These changes give the AI a greater focus on economic stability as well as improving some research related behaviors. We are collecting feedback on how these changes feel for our players, so please let us know in the comments on this post.

Population growth was the biggest Community issue with the 3.0 update, and we are exploring additional changes to this system. Some of these changes are long term initiatives, so in the meantime we’ve added Pop Growth Required and Pop Growth Ceiling sliders in the galaxy setup screen as quality of life features.

These sliders will allow you to adjust the variables related to the bonus a planet can provide through logistic growth (pop growth required), and the amount of pop cost increases per pop in an empire (pop growth ceiling). This will allow you to get achievements and play in iron man mode in a way that feels good to you.

Please note: changing these sliders can have major impacts on game balance and performance.

As previously mentioned, this update contains some missing localisations for non-English languages. We will be adding these missing non-English localisations soon, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

We expect to continue to iterate on these changes, and will be further refining economic balance and AI systems in future updates. Please leave feedback in the thread below on how the AI performs economically in the updated 3.0.3 Open Beta, and thank you again for your patience and understanding!

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!