Stellaris News

Feedback Requested: Factions and Politics

Hello Stellaris Community!

The devs have started trickling back into the office, and we expect to resume our regularly scheduled dev diaries next week! This means this is our final feedback post of the holiday break, but we’re ending strong with something that we know a lot of you have been wanting for a long time: factions and politics.

Internal politics is such a nebulous term, and it means many different things to different people, and we’ve discussed internally many times just what “Internal Politics” means to us. But this is our opportunity to ask:

What does internal politics mean to you?

Here’s what Eladrin said in DD #364:

Factions and Politics
Governments in Stellaris may hold a grudge against you for centuries for your atrocities but pops and factions are very quick to forgive and forget. There are no revanchist or irredentist factions that make trouble when borders change, nor variety within the factions themselves. I’d also like to see factions have their own tenets and goals and different ways that you can deal with them. There have been a lot of calls for an “internal politics” expansion, but I think that it would really be politics and culture in general, affecting both your empires and those around you.

If we were to do something along those lines, I’d also want to add some variant of factions to Gestalt empires - maybe Instincts for Hives that grow more dominant based on your behavior or Directives that compete for priority in Machine Intelligences. They’d have to feel different from individualistic factions, however. Among individualistic factions, I could see the tenets of an Egalitarian faction from a Shared Burdens empire being very different from the Egalitarian faction in a non-Worker Coop MegaCorp, and these tenets might also be used to define the beliefs of your Spiritualist factions. I’d certainly want to explore spreading my factions into other empires.

As previously mentioned in all of these feedback posts: This is not a guarantee that an internal politics rework will happen at some point in the future. This is us collecting feedback from the community to inform potential future development.

So, Stellaris Community, let us know what you think about the current implementation of Factions, and what internal politics means to you in our final feedback form: Internal Factions and Politics.

Thank you for all your feedback over the holiday season, and we can’t wait to see what you think of what’s coming next for Stellaris!

Stellaris: Season 08 only 24 hours remaining!

Hello Stellaris Community!

We hope you’ve all had a great holiday season, and we’re excited to see people starting to trickle back from their well-earned vacations. That means more Stellaris news is just right around the corner, with regularly scheduled dev diaries picking up in the next week or two.

But before we get too hyped over what’s coming next, we have to finish up some bookkeeping from last year. Specifically, we mentioned last year that we would be retiring Stellaris: Season 08 early in the new year. That time is now, specifically, tomorrow.

After tomorrow - around 3 PM CET - Stellaris: Season 08 will no longer be available and the content will be rolled into the Ultimate Bundle in order to make space for a new Season for 2025.

[h3]What is Stellaris: Season 08?[/h3]

Stellaris: Season 08 contains all the major Stellaris releases from 2024, including The Machine Age, the Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion, and Grand Archive Story Pack and the illustrious non-spherical Rick the Cube machine species portrait.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/46229/Stellaris_Season_08__Expansion_Pass/

The Machine Age contains:

Individualistic Non-Gestalt Machine Empires
Gestalt Machine Intelligence Empires (also unlocked by the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack)
A new End-Game Crisis - The Synthetic Queen
A new Player Crisis Path - Cosmogenesis
Three new Origins
- Cybernetic Creed
- Synthetic Fertility
- Arc Welders
Civics
- Guided Sapience
- Natural Design
- Obsessional Directive
- Protocol Droids
- Tactical Cogitators
- Augmentation Bazaars (requires Megacorp)
Two Mid-Game Structures
- Arc Furnace
- Dyson Swarm
Three New Ascension Paths
- Virtuality
- Nanotech
- Modularity
Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension (also unlocked by Utopia)
Exploration of the effects of the cyberization or synthesization of society, with Advanced Government Forms for those who complete it.
New Species Traits for Cyborgs, Machines and Robots
Cybernetic portraits that change based on advancement through cyberization
Synthetic portraits with both organic and synthetic variants that changed based on synthesization, usable by either organics or machines
Two new Shipsets, Diplomatic Rooms, and City Sets
7 new music tracks synthetic and cybernetic inspired music tracks

Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion contains:

8 New Space Storms
Storm Chasers Origin
3 New Civics
- Planetscapers
- Astrometeorology
- Storm Devotion
Galactic Weather Control Ascension Perk
Weather Forecasting Map Mode
Two new Precursor narratives, with two new Relics
Events, Anomalies, and Archaeology Sites
Storm-related technologies, Edicts, and Galactic community resolutions

Grand Archive Story Pack includes:

Space Fauna capture, breeding, and modification systems
151 Specimens to collect and display across events from Grand Archive and the base game
Over 240 Specimens total including those distributed across other Stellaris content
15 new Relics
New Megastructure - The Grand Archive
Two new Tradition trees
- Archivism
- Domestication
Two new Origins
- Primal Calling
- Treasure Hunters
Two new Civics
- Beastmasters
- Galactic Curators
Two new forms of spaceborne life
- Cutholoids
- Voidworms
A new possible mid-game crisis - the Voidworm Plague
Three new music tracks
Events, Anomalies, Archaeology Sites, Technologies, Galactic community resolutions, and more!

Season 08 Bonus Portrait: Rick the Cube

This is your last chance to get all the content above, plus the bonus Rick the Cube portrait at a 20% discount (outside of the Ultimate Bundle)!

Stellaris dev says espionage "isn't satisfying," so a rework is on the cards

Stellaris is one of the finest strategy games on Steam. It adapts developer Paradox's grand strategy roots into something that, pacing wise, is closer to 4X as you build and manage an empire of aliens. It's got exploration, it's got diplomacy, and it's got explosive warfare. But one aspect that has never really felt as satisfying as it should is espionage. As such, the studio is soliciting feedback from players as it looks at a potential rework in the future.

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Feedback Requested: Espionage

by MrFreake_PDX

Hello Stellaris Community!

We hope you’ve all had a great holiday season so far! We’ve collected some excellent feedback so far, with over 8000 responses to the two feedback forms to date.

If you want to leave some feedback on Pirates and Crime, there’s still time! The form will be active until next Monday, after which we will close responses.

The topic for this week’s feedback form is Espionage. We’ve often talked about an espionage rework, and know that many of you find espionage rather lackluster outside of certain circumstances. So here’s your chance to let us know what you think!

Here’s what Eladrin said in Dev Diary #364:

Espionage
Espionage is a related system that isn’t satisfying its promise currently, as Mr. Cosmogone reminds me during every design meeting.

It’s difficult to keep track of spy networks, is generally of low impact, and has no real counterplay. But he’s got schemes.

So, do you think espionage is deserving of a rework? What would you like to see in a reworked espionage system? What do you like about the current Espionage system?

Answer all these questions and more on this week’s Feedback Form: Espionage!

We hope you enjoy the rest of your holiday season, and we’ll be back with our last feedback form next week, after which we will return to our regular Dev Diary schedule.

Grand strategy game Stellaris gets cheapest price ever on Steam

Things aren't altogether great on Earth at the minute, and although consumer space travel seems a long way away still, Stellaris provides a mechanically-rich portal to the stars above. Right now, you can enjoy the spacefaring escapism for its lowest price ever at Steam.

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