Oct 28, 2019

Stellaris - Harlot

Hello everyone, it's your friendly neighborhood Associate Producer, Obidobi. We've seen your feedback and have put together a small patch to fix some of the major annoyances. To bring it to you faster, we're putting it up on a beta branch in Steam as we continue our verification process in-house.

While this patch will be put as a Beta branch on Steam, we are setting it as default on both GoG and Plaza. This means that if you want to play Multiplayer with your friends on other platforms, you'll have to switch to the Steam beta branch.

Here's the full changelog for 2.5.1:

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######################### VERSION 2.5.1 ##########################
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# UI
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* The tooltip for Livestock now mentions that Lithoid Livestock produce Minerals instead of Food
* Chat muting commands now work consistently between in-game and lobby chat

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# Bugfixes
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* Lithoid Empires with the Terravore civic should no longer occasionally end up blocked from social research
* Fixed so that players get the correct visual representation of chosen parts for the lithoid ships
* Fixed Lithoids wrongly getting unhappiness and growth penalties from negative food, this comes from negative minerals for them now
* Graphics options chosen in game launcher should actually apply in game now
* Launcher should correctly handle mods and game options on the Paradoxplaza version of the game
* Fixed a crash when network is disconnected

Please note that 2.5.1 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.

Also note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important 2.5.0 game going, don't try to load the save in 2.5.1.

We are standing by for your feedback on the version. We've allocated people and time for post-launch support and we'll be following your comments closely. To give us feedback on our forums go here.

f you are having any issues specifically with the new launcher, please let our colleagues in launcher team know:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/about-the-paradox-launcher.1254011/

Oct 25, 2019

Stellaris adds a stony-faced new faction in the Lithoids Species Pack

Stellaris

Stellaris, much like space itself, is always expanding. While the larger Federations expansion isn't due out later this year and set to overhaul the diplomatic side of the sprawling 4X strategy sandbox, Paradox Interactive rolled out an extra slab of optional DLC yesterday for players eager to expand their universe. The Lithoids Species Pack allows players to control an empire of planet-devouring mineral-based creatures. It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.

The Lithoids do sound like an interesting faction to play as. Slow off the starting line, but hard to stop once that boulder starts rolling. Being made of rock, they're largely unaffected by hostile environments, allowing them to settle down on any planet they encounter and devour it for resources; the crunchier the better. Whether you (or the AI) play them as a more intelligent and discerning pile of rocks or an all-consuming landslide is up to you.

They're also surprisingly easy on the eye. Take a look at their hippie-pleasing asymmetrical crystalline ships below, in a trailer cheekily accompanied by the percussion (but not melody, because lawyers) from Queen's We Will Rock You.

Owning this DLC not only lets you play as pre-baked Lithoid races, but also carve out your own custom variants, with 15 types of Lithoid portrait to work with, and one unusual Lithoid/Robot hybrid look, giving new meaning to the concept of silicon-based life. There's also a new Lithoid voice pack which I've not heard yet, but I'm assuming sounds a bit gravelly.

The Lithoids Species Pack DLC is out now on Steam, GOG and Paradox Plaza for £5.79/€7.99/$7.99.

Oct 24, 2019

Stellaris Dev Diary #157 - Things That Rock

Stellaris - Harlot

Hi everyone!

I’m Eladrin, Game Designer on Stellaris, and I’m one of the newer members of the Stellaris team. I joined the team during the development of Ancient Relics, and it’s been a blast. It was awesome meeting so many of you at PDXCON, and getting to hear so many ideas and excellent stories directly from you.

Back in Diary 152 and Dev Diary 153, Grekulf mentioned some of the Summer Experimentation that we did - but in today’s dev diary I wanted to talk about one of the things I worked on during the summer - game mechanics for the Lithoids.

The Lithoids Species Pack is very sedimental to me. When I wanted to dig deeper into the systems and get my hands dirty in the code, I looked at the “wouldn’t it be cool if…” list, and saw “...Lithoids ate minerals instead of food?” up near the top. This seemed like a solid foundation to start with, and a gneiss stepping stone to get my feet on the ground that fit my apatite - it seemed like a pretty simple change after all.

Okay, I’ll stop with the rock puns.

There are fifteen Lithoid portraits (and one new machine portrait), some of which have appearances that resemble some of the other phenotypes so you can do some interesting things with Syncretic Evolution.

Look at me! I'm a sparkly space unicorn!

The ships use a beautiful asymmetrical crystal design. Remember that the colors of your ships reflect your flag. You can use this to your advantage to make a pretty sweet looking fleet.

This is my favorite Titan in the game.

There’s also a Lithoid Advisor Voice. I may have stopped with the puns for now, but there’s no force in the universe that can stop the Lithoid Advisor.

Changing the Lithoids to consume minerals was simple enough, but we also wanted to embrace the sci-fi trope of slow growing rock beings living in inhospitable climates. We started by giving them a massive boost to habitability which they still retain today, and a much larger pop growth penalty than they eventually ended up with. For flavor they receive a bonus to Army Health, and we increased their leader lifespans (but have their leaders start somewhat older as well).

Every little change leads to several more, however. If a species eats minerals instead of food, their homeworld should start with extra mining districts and no agricultural districts built. In fact, if a species evolved to eat rocks, their homeworld should probably by mineral rich and food poor. But wait, what about if they’re a Syncretic Evolution species, or if a Rogue Servitor wants to start with pet rocks? What about if they want to be a Devouring Swarm?

Many minor changes came along with what started as a simple economic change. Just a few examples include the Lithoids being tragically unable to be declared the most delicious species in the galaxy if there are any alternatives, loosening restrictions a bit on Bio-Reactors, modifying the Fleeting trait to be -25 years for Lithoids instead of -10, and a handful of Tradition changes. We also added a few Lithoid specific traits that allow them to generate small amounts of special resources every month.

After many rounds of qualitative feedback and a huge number of playdays, we ended up with the following as the Lithoid species trait:

The large habitability boost that Lithoids receive allow them to colonize worlds that would be marginal for other species, allowing them to work around their slower pop growth speed. Empires with a Lithoid primary species also begin with Lithoid Monolith blockers on their homeworld that can be removed at a large mineral cost for an additional Lithoid pop. (A Lithoid specific Origin in Federations modifies these a bit, and… we’ll talk more about that in another Dev Diary.)

So very sleepy.

The Lithoid trait is automatically applied to any species that uses a Lithoid portrait. For the Xenophiles out there, Half-Lithoids generated by Xeno-Compatibility follow this rule as well, so if the portrait is a Lithoid it will consume minerals instead of food, produce minerals when purged, and so on.

We’ve exposed this ability so modders should be able to similarly add phenotype forced traits to species they create by adding trait = "trait_lithoid" to the species class entry. (Replacing the Lithoid trait with their own custom species trait, of course.) I look forward to seeing what you do with it.

As for the Lithoid Devouring Swarm… They don’t have precisely the same motivations as a regular Devouring Swarm. While they will still press organics inhabiting the worlds they take into nutritive paste for the Bio-Reactors, their hunger is a bit more ambitious. Renamed Terravores, they operate largely the same way as a regular Devouring Swarm, but once off their homeworld they have an additional planetary decision to consume the habitable worlds of the galaxy, leaving devastated husks in their wake:

Are you going to eat that?

Terravores are barred from Terraforming (and thus do not have access to Hive Worlds) and cannot clear the devastation they leave behind, but other empires can clean up after them, though it takes a major effort.

Modders will now be able to change the name and description of a civic out for another based on species class, similar to how traditions can be swapped.

I’m quite pleased with how the Lithoids turned out, I think they're a real gem. I hope that you all enjoy it just as much.

In a few hours the free 2.5.0 patch will be up and the Lithoids Species Pack will be available for shale, so pick it up, rock out, and leave the galaxy gravelling at your feet!

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# Balance
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* The Pop Growth Reduction for Bio-Trophies now actually reduces their growth rate. Driven Assimilators now apply their organic growth penalty as a multiplier the same way as Rogue Servitors do, and is now also 50%
* Defensive Platforms placed on Outposts now provide 2 points of Piracy Suppression for their system. The Great Game tradition from the Supremacy tree now also reduces the cost to build Defensive Platforms by 33%

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# UI
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* Shift+clicking on ship count in the Fleet Manager now adds ships up to the nearest unit of ten, using ctrl fills up to the template max size (for realzies this time)
* The Shared Burdens civic will no longer appear by itself in the civics list when you select Gestalt Consciousness ethics but have not yet selected Machine Intelligence or Hive Minded authority
* Added a notification when one empire guarantees the independence of another

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# AI
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* Automated building now checks that upkeep cost is covered by income

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# Bugfixes
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* Fixed wrong save file being loaded from the resume button in the launcher, caused by a conflict between local and cloud saves
* Fixed the game complaining about mods not being in UTF8-BOM3 for no good reason
* Fixed a potential crash in AI when evaluating market values
* Fixed cases where planetary events could fire multiple notifications
* Odd Factories no longer sometimes block pops from getting purged, because you monsters should be free to purge whatever you want
* Mod load order is now the same as the order in which the mods are displayed

You can also read this Dev Diary and comment on our forums, here.

Oct 19, 2019

Stellaris: Federations announced, expanding space diplomacy

Stellaris

Federations, the next DLC for Stellaris, was announced today at PDXCon, Parardox Interactive’s annual fan convention. The focus this time is on diplomacy, after previous expansions have fleshed out the military, economy, and internal politics of the sprawling space 4X.

Federations have been a part of Stellaris from the beginning, building bridges of cooperation between sovereign empires. In this expansion though, they're getting a huge face-lift. The old school, vanilla, Star Trek sort (now called a Galactic Union) will still be around, but Paradox is adding several new, more specialized types of federations such as Research Co-Ops for science-minded factions and Trade Leagues for economically focused partnerships. Gaining more federation members and maintaining Cohesion (basically, keeping everyone on the same page policy-wise) will allow Federations to level up and gain mechanical perks, like increased federation fleet size.

The other major feature is the Galactic Community, a kind of "Space UN" that can be founded once you've met most of your star neighbors and the galaxy starts to become more interconnected. No empire is obligated to join, but those that opt-out will receive a colder welcome than those on the inside. Those that choose to leave after having joined will be especially reviled.

Members of the Galactic Community can propose resolutions that each of the other members will be able to vote on. Focusing on a new resource called Diplomatic Weight will give your votes more power and your resolutions higher priority, but building it will come at the expense of other areas like your military and economy. Resolutions that pass, such as banning sentient AI or establishing minimum rights for workers, will be binding for all members of the Galactic Community. The only way around these resolutions is to leave and incur the massive diplomatic penalty that comes with that act.

Also on the way is the Lithoids species pack, which will introduce several new portraits for species based on rocks, crystals, and other inorganic matter. They are unique not only in appearance, but in that they consume minerals instead of food, giving them a very different economy to manage.

The Lithoids species pack will be out on October 24 and Federations is set to launch later in the year.

Oct 16, 2019

The Stellaris mobile game remains offline as Paradox investigates stolen art assets

Stellaris

Yesterday's announcement of the sci-fi strategy MMO Stellaris: Galaxy Command was interesting because it marked what appeared to be a pretty big move into mobile gaming by Paradox, a publisher whose games generally aren't what you'd call mobile-friendly. But things took an unexpected twist when, shortly after our post went live, Paradox took down the beta, which had been soft-launched in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden.

The problem, Paradox said in a tweet, was that at least one piece of artwork in the game "was taken from another source." It didn't say who, but it was quickly determined to have come from Halo—the original image can be seen on the ArtStation page of Kenny Magnusson, the technical art director at Halo studio 343 Industries. Paradox—which is publishing but not developing the game, Stellaris: Galaxy Command is being made by mobile studio GameBear—apologized and took the game offline "to perform a full content sweep and ensure this issue is resolved."

While only one image immediately jumped out as stolen, it's possible that Paradox is now discovering more deeply-rooted problems. In an update posted earlier today, it said that the "initial analysis" of art assets has been completed, "however we feel this situation requires more scrutiny."

"We have taken the decision to continue the hiatus. The game's servers will remain offline and its availability will be limited while a full investigation is run," Paradox said. "The whole process will take place shortly and, as soon as we're able, we'll update you again on when the game will be possible to play."

In a reply tweet, Paradox also addressed complaints that Stellaris: Galaxy Command is simply a reskin of GameBear's mobile strategy game Nova Empire, a complaint that arose when an error message shown to users who declined to grant the game required permissions referred to it as Nova Empire. "No denying that this is embarassing but it's actually a placeholder text that was copied into our game during the early stage of development, before we had a name," Paradox explained.

Paradox's move into mobile gaming hasn't exactly been greeted with universal applause from its existing fan base—no surprise there, really—and this obviously doesn't help with initial impressions. But Paradox appears to be handling it as well as can be expected, with a quick takedown, unequivocal apology, and what appears to be an in-depth examination of the rest of the game. And while free-to-play mobile games are sometimes burdened with egregious monetization options, I still think the promise of an EVE Online-style game that doesn't require EVE Online-style dedication and focus might be enough to change some minds, if the developers can pull it off.

The Halo 4 concept art used in Stellaris: Galaxy Command can be seen below; directly below is its appearance in the game. I've reached out to Paradox for more information and will update if I receive a reply.