Stellaris News

Hello everyone!

As you may know we have a beta patch available on Steam on the "Stellaris_test" branch and we are happy to announce that we've updated it with some further changes. There's still at least one more fix regarding Save games and rollbacks we want to get in, however we thought it best to give you the additional fixes we have today while we continue with the proper work processes that are required to get 2.8.1 out on all platforms in its final form!

The additional fixes are highlighted in the changelog. Two fixes in particular of note, dx11 should now properly work with all languages (Check the original release thread to see how to enable it). We've also updated the AI behavior around "Take Point", we've added an explanation under the changelogs to explain how the AI reacts to the player using the "Take Point" command.

[h3]2.8.1 "BUTLER" PATCH NOTES[/h3]

[h3]VERSION 2.8.1 [/h3]

Balance
* Added a define OVERCROWDING_ABSOLUTE_THRESHOLD_FOR_NO_GROWTH that sets the minimum number that overcrowding must be for a planet's population to stop growing, set it to 5.
* Redid sector automation scripts and code with the following goals:
** Closed vital gaps in sectors' knowledge concerning the likes of nonstandard planet (habitat etc) districts and bureaucracy buildings.
** All sectors now know about all buildings, i.e. if you put an alloys foundry on a science sector, it will still know how to upgrade it (it will of course still favour research buildings).
** Made checking for whether building a certain building would cause resource shortages and whether there were pops ready to take the job more reliable by shifting them to hardcoded checks.
** The automation will no longer clear blockers before districts are blocked by them.


Stability & Performance
* Moved the calculations for attack radius to threaded code instead of serial.
* Update trade routes every 7 days instead of every day.
* Fixed a nasty slow down when owning many many many planets and opening the planet view
* Fixed an OOS related to fleets.
* Fixed an issue where loading would get stuck when trying to load a lot of mods.

UI
* Added debug tooltips to the fleet view header and rename button.
* Experimental DX11 mode now supports Chinese, Polish and Russian

AI
* The AI will not try to build a megastructure if it's already building or upgrading one.
* Fixed a case of the AI wanting to attack disabled starbases and getting stuck in a loop.
* The economic AI will now take better account of the resources a district would provide when choosing whether to build one.
* The AI will now check whether it would have any pops on the planet willing and able to take a job before building a building providing that job (i.e. Necrophages will not spam consumer goods buildings when there are no necrophage pops on the planet).
* Made the contingency constructor choose better systems to build in, and fixed their getting stuck after a while.
* Massively sped up all types of purging, with the crisis factions now purging 2 pops per month.
* Various improvements to crisis military AI.
* Fix issue with military AI ping-ponging fleets.
* Fixed AI not changing fleet bombardment stances.
* Crisis countries will now use Armageddon Bombardment.
* Augmented the distance at which AI looks for targets on larger maps.
* The Unbidden will no longer wait patiently to be allowed out of their initial system.
* The AI will no longer sell the last pop of a planet.
* Made the crisis worry less about ship health and more about taking over the galaxy.
* The Necrophage AI will no longer build Houses of Apotheosis so as to make it less likely it'll run out of necrophytes.
* AI considers "Take Point" fleet as objective when appropriate(*)
* The AI is now drastically more likely to know to build shipyards and titan/colossus factories

Modding
* Added "ignores_sapience" flag to job types to say a job works for both sapients and presapients.

Bugfixes
* Corrected name for necroid titan engine effect so the effect spawns in the correct position.
* Added missing undead army translations for Chinese.
* Fixed a layering issue with Necroid Portrait 11.
* Fixed a black face-tentacle on a Necroid Portrait to have color.
* Fix Ships not reaching their assigned slots when there are too many ships
* Evasive fleet now cancel order if the path to their targets contain hostiles
* Made it so the positions of hostile forces are remembered while you're at war.
* Fixed purging and assimilation not working on presapients
* Setting a sector to Production focus now correctly updates the icon in the UI.
* Necrophages with Glandular Acclimatisation will now make pops that suit the local planet, even if they have Necrophage pops that don't on the planet already.
* Death Priest job upkeep raised to 3 Consumer Goods in addition to the baseline level for specialist workers.
* Fixed the Pasharti Absorbers' default purge type being Displacement rather than Necropurging
* Fixed a bug with a Necroid Battleship weapon slot.
* Increased Necroid Corvette size and optimized some other textures.
* Fixed leader clearing by right-clicking.
* Fixed impossibility of swapping scientists between research areas.
* Fixed the Death Cult sacrifice effects so that the counting of Mortal Initiates proceeds as intended.
* The option to play as the Machine Uprising when that happens is now back.

[h3]
TAKE POINT AI BEHAVIOR EXPLAINED[/h3]
Both countries must have the "follow allies" flag, or the leading country has to be human
if both countries are in a war:
- Vassals will follow their Overlords.
- If they're in the same war:
- - The AI will follow the war leader if they're in a defensive war.
- - The AI will also follow a stronger ally if they're close enough.
- - They'll follow a human player if they're not human.
- If the AI is fighting the Crisis.
- - If they're in a federation, they'll follow the federation leader (or a human player).
- - If the AI isn't under attack by the crisis they'll follow someone who is.
- - They'll follow a human who is also fighting the Crisis.

We hope you'll enjoy these additional fixes and that it shows that we are indeed listening to your feedback :D
Please note that 2.8.1 is an optional beta patch. 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.

Hi all!

As mentioned last week, our plan for today is to go over some changes to automated colony management and pop resettlement.

Major goals here were to reduce the micromanagement burden in the mid to late game when individual decisions are less oppressive, and to significantly decrease the need to manually move pops at all. As with the economic changes we were discussing before, a lot of this is still a work in progress to varying degrees.
[h3]
Automated Colony Management[/h3]

Some sector management improvements have already been made in the 2.8.1 test branch (you can experiment and leave feedback on it by following the instructions in this thread), but here we’ll be focusing on planetary designations and individual planet automation.

A major pass has been done on automated colony management to improve its effectiveness. After manually setting a colony designation and turning on automated colony management, our intent is for the colony to develop into something you would reasonably expect if you were building it on your own. It should build districts, clear deposits as necessary, and upgrade buildings when there is a need for it.

Planet automation will upgrade capital buildings whenever possible (gotta unlock those building slots!), and will otherwise generally try to build or upgrade from its list if there are less than 3 open jobs. We’ve erred a bit on the side of caution, so it is currently extremely opposed to running deficits. It may require manual intervention if, for example, your energy credits per month are negative, but we figured it was better to leave those sorts of risky economic decisions in the player’s hands.

If you want to check out the Foundry Automation (Hive) Script, check it out in the forum post here

This script will attempt to build a forge world for a hive empire. If there are less than 3 free jobs and there is nothing currently in the build queue, it will check to see if there is anything that it can build. Planetary automation has a tendency to favor districts over buildings, but will construct buildings if there are 1.5 times as many districts already built than there are buildings. (This ratio is able to be set in 00_defines.txt as COLONY_AUTOMATION_DISTRICT_PREFERENCE.) When selecting a building, it will move down the list until it finds something that it is capable of building and meets the scripted restrictions. The building’s upkeep is always taken into consideration. The scripted “_affordable” checks are to estimate whether you can afford the jobs it creates as well.

Blockers are fairly low priority for planetary automation, and will only be cleared if they are blocking a district slot that it actively wants to construct, or if there are no free district slots remaining. (Thus it will eventually clear all those random blockers once the rest of the planet is finished.) You can, of course, intervene and clear those Sprawling Slums or sleepy Lithoids earlier.

Buildings (other than the capital) will be upgraded if there are no other things that it wants to build right now, it can upgrade without causing resource deficits, and there are pops available that would want to work there. (Either because they’re unemployed or they prefer it to their current jobs.)

The scripts will attempt to handle various issues that may crop up on a planet such as low amenities, high crime, or failure to build buildings dedicated to extra-dimensional beings that love you and just want to be loved in return. These are tucked away in 00_crisis_exceptions.txt.


If you want to check out the Amenity Crisis Exception (Regular Empire) Script, check it out in the forum post here

This "exception" will intervene if a planet’s amenities are -5 or below, and it’s either not an ecumenopolis or if it is an ecumenopolis, it’s either totally full or you’re running low on exotic gases. Based on your ethics and authority, it’ll pick one of the amenity buildings to add to the queue.

A few jobs, buildings, and planet designations have gotten a bit of a touch-up during this pass. Notable examples of designations include the Urban World, which now has a Trade Value bonus, and the Colony, which is now intended to satisfy the needs of a newly colonized world rather than provide pop growth bonuses.



Urban and Colony Designations

The old Colony bonus was changed because it was a bit problematic - growth bonuses made it somewhat stronger than many other more specialized bonuses. We’d greatly prefer if you could flag that newly settled Mining World as such right away and immediately turn on automation, rather than it being optimal to manually develop the world until it reached 5 pops and no longer qualified for Colony.

Due to its inherent terror of deficits, the automation scripts tend to be a little bit more conservative than players may be, but I’ve personally enjoyed the dramatically reduced mental burden my mid to late game colonies require. It’s also convenient that several designations (such as Forge, Factory, Tech, and Urban) will build out colonies that qualify for the Arcology Project decision. In our dev multiplayer games, I've been making a point of using colony automation as much as possible in order to give everyone else a chance get a feel for what it's doing. (Except my capital. I'll admit that I do manually build that so I can take care of sudden shifts in priority.)

If you're using planetary automation but it doesn't seem to be doing anything, the three most common things to check are:

• Is the colony in a Sector?
  Colonies have to be in a (non-Frontier) Sector in order to use either sector or planetary automation.
  
• Am I running an energy deficit?
  Most districts and buildings have energy upkeep. While it's possible for the district or building to theoretically produce enough energy to overcome that and help work off the current deficit, the automation scripts are as light as possible and without deeper analysis can't assume that pops moving into those jobs wouldn't worsen the shortage. Manual intervention is necessary to dig out of an energy crunch.
  
• Do I have resources in the automation pool for it to use?
  There's a notification for this, but if the pool is running low it might not be able to afford whatever it is it wants to build. Remember, you can hold Ctrl to change the units moved from hundreds to thousands.
  

Save mouse-clicks, use Ctrl.

[h3]Resettlement[/h3]

Manual resettlement and the mitigation of unemployment is a huge burden in mid to late game Stellaris. It is generally our belief that manual resettlement should be an extremely rare occurrence, not something done expected to be done as part of the core game loop. When you must, it should be a simple process, but it should be an unusual act.

One quality of life change we’ve made is to filter Unemployed pops up to the top, and highlighted them. The pops underneath are then sorted from lowest stratum to highest.



You're unlikely to see this specific scenario unless you intentionally create unemployment problems by turning off jobs in every pop strata.

We've also adjusted resettlement costs, and added an Influence cost to many pop types. These influence costs are nominal for worker tier pops, but get fairly expensive when you're forcing Rulers to move.

Slave Resettlement and Worker/Drone/Bio-Trophy Resettlement

Specialist Resettlement and Ruler Resettlement

Slaves and unintelligent robots can still be moved without expending Influence, and certain civics permit you to waive these Influence costs.


Hey wait, what's that about colony abandonment?

Despite their best efforts the Servitors still haven't found a good way to get their Bio-Trophies to shift their consciousness to a different planet using OTA updates, so you still have to pay for them.

Manually resettling the last pop off a colony you own carries an additional influence surcharge in our dev builds. There will very likely be an exception made for Doomed planets and Holy Worlds that are risking initiating a war with a Fallen Empire. A planetary decision to abandon a recently conquered planet is under consideration, though it'll likely use displacement purging to do so. (With the diplomatic penalties associated with it.)

But we just finished building it!

With Federations, we introduced a galactic resolution in the Greater Good line that provided limited automated resettlement called Greater Than Ourselves. As noted by some, that was partially intended as a means to allow Egalitarian leaning empires a way of handling resettlement without forcing it on their pops. There have been many requests to make that core game functionality, but we’ve been somewhat wary of doing so without some restrictions.

We've come up with a way for every empire to have easier access to a similar effect. The following new Starbase Building will handle it, unlocked by the Hyperlane Breach Points tech. (The Hyperlane Registrar has moved to Interstellar Economics.)

They like to move it.



The tooltip effect is a bit of a mouthful.

The Transit Hub will operate as a limited variant of Greater Than Ourselves, moving unemployed low strata pops between planets that are in systems with Transit Hubs. (This will allow movement within a system as well, for example if you have a bunch of habitats in a single system.) We're investigating ways to expand the scope of pops it's willing to move - the original Worker limitation was put into place because while a Worker could promote themselves to fill any free job, a Slave or Specialist might find themselves restricted from the free job on the new planet. We're currently experimenting with a more robust variant - if it works out without performance concerns, the Transit Hub will prioritize high strata unemployment and then move down the ranks.

Building out the Transit network does function best when you have a developed starbase above most of your colonies since it will only move pops between nodes on the network.

Tangentially related, we've also cut demotion time in half across the board, and made some changes to give each Authority type a unique bonus.

Yes, Shared Burdens pops demote pretty much instantly.

We have some other experimental changes going on that significantly reduce the number of unemployed pops in the late game but we're not ready to talk about them yet.

The empire type that perhaps faced the most obnoxious burden of frequent manual resettlement were Terravores, the Lithoid Devouring Swarms. When devouring planets, they occasionally created pops on the consumption world. As a quality of life improvement, when they’ve finished the planet off we now resettle them back to the capital. (Since gestalts can also use the Transit Hub, I highly recommend that Terravores build one in their main system to send those drones someplace where they can be of use.)

Oh, and we also clear that pesky red habitability planet marker from completely consumed planets that was unnecessarily cluttering your map.



HP/MP restored! ...But you're still hungry.

As a reminder, we have an ongoing feedback thread related to AI improvements we have in beta on the stellaris_test branch. We'd love to get more people on it and telling us what they think about them. (Please note that 2.8.1 is an optional beta patch. 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.)

Next week we plan on going through some more of the remaining economic balance changes. See you then!

Hi everyone!

Way back in Dev Diary 152, we discussed some planetary changes that we experimented with during summer 2019. At the time, we decided that while we learned a lot from the experiment, they required significant additional refinement before being something we wanted to incorporate into Stellaris.

Summer 2020 gave us the additional time we needed to revive these (and some other) experiments. Our primary objectives were to reduce the mid to late game micromanagement burden and provide quality of life improvements, including generally making the prebuilding of planets more viable, making planetary automation reliable enough to be trusted in the mid to late game, and making dealing with unemployment and pops easier.

We’ll be talking about these subjects in multiple dev diaries over the next couple of months.
[h3]
Industrial Districts[/h3]

Azure Chalice is… er, was... a lovely place.

The planet view has shifted things around a bit and now supports the display of up to six district types. Most planets will have five district types available. This extra real estate could also be of special interest to modders.

The new brownish-orange district next to the City District is the revived Industrial District. Industrial Districts are treated as urban districts (and as such are not limited by planetary features), but rather than the Laborers that split their output from the original experiment, we’ve decided to have the districts provide regular empires one Artisan and one Metallurgist job. Gestalts have either two Foundry Drones or Fabricators as appropriate.

Work, work, work.

Factories and Foundries will still exist but are now planet unique, with the first tier building adding 2 jobs to the planet just like the old versions. The upgraded versions, however, will now add either 1 or 2 jobs of the appropriate type to each Industrial District on the planet.

Ecumenopoli will retain their specialized districts, but can be boosted by the Foundry or Factory buildings. The number of jobs per district on ecumenopoli have been adjusted somewhat as part of an overall economic balance pass. Since Industrial Districts are considered urban, a planet with a mix of City and Industrial Districts can be paved over and turned into an Ecumenopolis using the Arcology Project decision.

Since districts are now much more critical to the development of your civilization, the average size of homeworlds has been increased by 2, and as an additional side effect, the Mastery of Nature Ascension Perk may also become a bit more desirable.


[h3]Building Slots
[/h3]
I’m sure you’ve already noticed from the above screenshot, Building Slots no longer list population counts. Instead of relying on population, they're opened up by increasing the infrastructure of the planet. This is generally done by building City Districts (or their equivalent) or by upgrading the colony's Capital building. As a pleasant side effect of this, your buildings will no longer get ruined when a pop gets resettled, ritually killed, or eaten by mutants.

Build up that infrastructure.

Two new technologies that unlock additional Building Slots have also been added, Ceramo-Metal Infrastructure and Durasteel Infrastructure. They represent the civilian adoption of military technology, and as such require some government techs and the associated armor technologies. The Adaptability tradition tree, for those that have it, still has a tech that grants a Building Slot as well.

As specialized and advanced worlds, Ecumenopoli, Ring Worlds, Hive Worlds, and Machine Worlds start with all of their building slots unlocked.

Habitats are intended to feel a bit cramped, so while Habitation Modules do not open up Building Slots, the Voidborne Ascension Perk will continue to grant two Building Slots to those that choose to embrace living in space.

The MegaCorps out there may ask “but what about our Branch Offices?” - we’ve got you covered.

Insider Trading. Institutionalized corruption exploited by the upper classes, or just greasing the wheels of trade?

Branch Offices will tie their slots to the level of the colony’s capital building. For example, a Planetary Administration building will grant one Branch Office Building Slot, a Planetary Capital will grant two, and a System Capital-Complex would grant three. If the target empire has the Insider Trading tradition, you’ll have one extra Branch Office Building Slot. (This may grant you a Branch Office building even on newly colonized worlds, if your business plan expects it to be profitable.)

[h3]But Why?[/h3]

By decoupling the building unlocks from population growth, it makes it much easier to “prebuild” a planet to varying degrees. It removes some of the tedium of waiting for that last pop to finish growing before a slot unlocks, as well as the negative experience that occurred when a critical pop moved or died right at the wrong time. This change went through many iterations - in one of them the rural and industrial districts added "fractional" slots, in another the capital buildings gave more slots at each upgrade. The combination of having both City Districts and the Capital Building contributing to the slots, along with the additional techs, finally felt right. It's nice when even a newly founded Colony possesses at least one open building slot since it lets you immediately begin construction of a Spawning Pool or other high value building right away.

Moving the essential secondary resources of Consumer Goods and Alloys to districts frees up the building slots a little bit and creates a greater differentiation between heavily urbanized or industrial planets and resource generating colonies. Qualitatively we also felt that it "feels nice" to be getting more of your physical resources from the district level, leaving the Building Slots for more unique and specialized needs.

Both of these changes also happen to make some planetary automation decisions a little easier - your Tech Worlds should clearly build a mix of City and Industrial districts, for instance, to make room for Research Labs as well as to provide the Consumer Goods needed to pay for them. We do recognize that it may be difficult - or even impossible - to unlock all Building Slots on a planet that has not been urbanized, but those resource generating planets often do not have quite as strong a need for a large number of buildings.

Ideally in the mid to late game you could colonize a planet, set the colony designation you want for the planet, turn on automation, and reasonably expect the planet to be in decent shape - and doing what you told it to - the next time you look at it. (In the early game it's certainly possible, but your empire's economy may not be stable enough to support dedicated worlds and your colonies may be better off with direct caretaking.)

We have a few other experiments that are still ongoing that affect the relationship between urbanized vs. less developed planets that are not entirely conclusive yet. If they prove out we'll discuss them later on in this series of diaries. Our current plan for next week's diary is to talk more about the automated colony management overhaul as well as the automatic and manual resettlement of pops.

As a reminder, we have an ongoing feedback thread related to AI improvements we have in beta on the stellaris_test branch. We'd love to get more people on it and telling us what they think about them. (Please note that 2.8.1 is an optional beta patch. 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.)

Thanks!

Hello everyone!

We are proud to announce that the Necroids Species Pack is now live!



We are super proud of this release and we are excited to see what kind of spOooOOky Empires you all will create with this new addition to Stellaris!

Get your copy of the Necroids Species Pack here!

In addition, we will also have a Halloween themed multiplayer stream this weekend (in the true undead spirit of the Necroids Species Pack) on https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive!

Halloween Multiplayer Stream Schedule

Saturday October 31st 5pm CET (4pm UK, 12pm EDT 9am PDT)
Sunday November 1st 5pm CET (4pm UK, 11am ET, 8am PT)



Stay safe out there and have a Happy Halloween!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6ON871QXrY&feature=emb_title