Today we're continuing the Q&A series we're doing, answering questions related to different topics. Last week we asked you to post your questions related to Origins, which were previously revealed in Dev Diary #160.

Here we go!


How will randomly created AI empires choose an origin? Will it be completely random, or are some more likely to show up than others? If the latter, which logic does it follow?
The weightings are scriptable. The default currently has a weight of 100, others that are available to the AI (which is most of them) have between 2 and 10, so statistically you are likely to have a few of them once you have 10+ AI nations. Some origins like Doomsday are also blocked for advanced AIs as that wouldn't fit the narrative.

Many are also restricted so they will only randomly generate if that origin is not already represented in the galaxy.

Are there any events related to each Origin? (And many similar questions.)
Yes. Some origins, such as the Galactic Doorstep, are primarily narrative-based and thus have many events. Others, like the Shattered Ring, are primarily changes to an empire's starting conditions and have few, if any (other than custom start text).

Will the preset empires have different origins? Will they have new civics picked to substitute those that become origins? (What will happen with the Xanid Suzerainty for example?)
Yes, preset empires have origins. Most of them have Prosperous Unification, but some have others.

Empires that previously had civics that have been turned into origins will have new civics given to them. As examples, the Xanid Suzerainty now has Corvée System and Cutthroat Politics, and the Lokken Mechanists have Technocracy and Meritocracy.

Can you change your origins through events?
No, that would involve timeline alterations and the potential destruction of the space-time continuum.

Will there be origins that allow for special tech, that is otherwise unobtainable? For example, could a Fallen Empire share tech for Fallen empire buildings with you if you choose the Scion start?
We do not currently have any origins that have unobtainable tech, but this would be possible.

I believe you mentioned before that each origin had special events. Will we still have the special start events of say Mass Extinction, Habitable planet survey, and Radical Cult events? Will they still happen even if we pick say Doomsday or Remnants or Void Dwellers?
Some event chains have been disabled for certain Origins, when they no longer made sense.

Do Fallen Empires have origins?
Yes, for flavor they have been given a unique "Elder Race" Origin.

If you want to find out more about Origins, check out the full post here . PS. Next week, our Tech Lead Moah will be posting a dev diary giving an update on performance improvements planned for the 2.6 "Verne" update... Stay tuned!

Greetings!

As a part of the Q&A series we're doing, we will be answering your questions related to different topics. Last week we asked you to post your questions related to diplomacy, and we want to thank you for all the questions we've gotten.

Before we jump into the questions, I'll take the opportunity to mention that the Q&A series will continue next week as well, and you can already post your questions about Origins.
Q: Will Diplomatic deals get a similar treatment to Federations, in that they require higher “levels” before unlocking all mechanics?
A: Not specifically, but diplomatic actions now require certain Relations levels before being able to be proposed. (Envoys can be used to relax these restrictions.)

Q: Will the interstellar assembly megastructure mechanics be changed for the update?
A: Yes. The immigration bonus has been replaced with a Diplomatic Weight bonus, and at stages II and IV the Interstellar Assembly grants additional envoys.



Q: Will you be expanding ways to improve relations with another empire beyond the current resource bribes?
A: Yes, there is a new diplomatic action called Improve Relations which allows you to increase an empire’s opinion of you.

Q: Will AI empires that covet my territory try to sabotage relations? In other situations, will the AI try to modify relations to where it thinks they should be?
A: AI empires will use the Improve Relations envoy action if they are interested in pursuing other deals, or Harm Relations if they dislike you and either want you as a rival or want to insult you.

Q: Will we be able to get custom settings to choose which diplomatic notifications we are interested in receiving, and perhaps nuance to such a system such as "nations of interest" and "nations of total irrelevance".
A: No, but you can disable certain types of alerts by shift-right clicking on them. (You can re-enable disabled alert types by toggling that section on in the Outliner and right clicking on them.)

Q: Will having any diplomatic relationship bigger than Open Borders still generate Xenophile attraction?
A: If you are in a federation, defensive pact, or commercial pact with an empire that is a different species, then yes, the xenophiles gain a bonus to ethics attraction. (And contact with an empire that has enslaved or genocided pops of your species provides a xenophile attraction penalty.)

Q: Will there be some new (diplomacy related) Ascension Perks?
A: There are no new Ascension Perks, but Galactic Contender now also grants a Diplomatic Weight bonus.




If you want to read more about Diplomatic Questions and start asking questions about Origins, have a read here!

Hello again!

As part of our Q&A series, this week we're going through the questions you've asked about the Galactic Community. As expected, there were a lot of them, so we condensed a few similar questions together.

While some of the Diplomacy related questions are answered here, we're compiling questions for the next Q&A in this thread.

Q: Will founding the galactic community be based on a bit more that just meeting half of the players? The real UN was very, very simply put the result of two world wars. It wouldn't make a lot of sense if there immediately was the diplomatic will to form this forum just by meeting a bunch of people.
A: The event chain that initially attempts to form the Galactic Community begins once a non-genocial and non-gestalt empire has encountered at least half the galaxy, and at least three non-genocial empires agree to form the Community. If it fails to form, there will be additional opportunities later.



Q:Are we 'in' by default, or does we get a choice to join when GC is formed?
A: You are given a choice whether or not you wish to join the Community. (This is also the case for empires that were not part of the initial founding but gain communications with a galactic community member.)

Q: How do we get out? / Is leaving the galactic community a permanent decision?
A: You can leave at any time by paying an Influence cost that scales with your Empire Sprawl.



As noted, you cannot rejoin for a period of twenty years, during which you have reduced Diplomatic Weight and an opinion penalty with Galactic Community Members.

Q: If an empire leaves the galactic community to escape sanctions will other members get some casus belli against them?
A: It depends on what Resolutions have passed. Usually, no.

So this was a sneak peek from our Galactic Community Q&A, if you want to find out more have a read here!

Hello everyone!

In last week's dev diary we talked about the new Q&A format that we will be doing for the next couple of dev diaries. We asked you to post your questions regarding the federation rework, and we're glad to see so many questions!

Next week's topic will be the Galactic Community, and you can already post your questions here!

Anyway, let's begin with the Q&A:

Q: Are subjects forced to join some federation types (or all?) if you ask them to?
A: It’s up to your federation whether or not subjects are allowed in. If they are permitted, they will automatically follow their overlord in or out.

Q: Can you make/start a federation with your subjects?
A: Federations are (theoretically) alliances between equals, so independent diplomacy is required to initially form one. As noted elsewhere, vassals may be brought into federations (whether they like it or not) depending on federation law.

Q: Can you form a trade-league with a 1-planet sector you released as a vassal for just that purpose?
A: No and yes. Yes, you can release a 1-planet sector with the intention of starting a federation, but they would need to be independent for you to be able form it.

Q: Will there be any tools (laws, for instance) to combat ethics drift within a Federation? It would be nice to have a way to deal with an incompatible empire other than expelling them (then reabsorbing via a liberation war).
A: No, there is no way for you to influence the ethics of other empires. The cohesion penalty is meant to be offset by having to assign more envoys to the federation.

Q: Can you pass federation laws regulating member policies? For instance, decree that all primary species must have full citizenship throughout all federation empires? Or just outlaw slavery altogether? Because I hate seeing my own species enslaved by allies I have a migration treaty with.
A: There are currently no laws to influence other empires like that within the federation, but we’re certainly open to the idea. Once Federations is released we’ll be gathering your feedback as always

Q: Will we be able to pass laws that affect specific pop types? For example, I want to have all empires in my Hegemony, or all my vassal empires be forced to set Starfish pops to purge status (after all everyone seems to think that Starfish portrait represents fanatic purifiers the best).
A: Same as the answer above.

Q: How many federation laws are there?
A: There are currently 14 categories of laws, with each category having 2-5 laws.

Q: Can we get an Academic Debate succession type for Research Cooperatives?
A: There is in fact a Challenge Type called Thesis, which very much mimics what we think you are looking for. It’s available to all federation types.

Q: Could we get an example of more federation laws?
A: Yes we can! In dev diary #158 you could see most of the laws, but there are some things that have been changed or added since then. We now have the Strongest Succession Type, which is split up into different categories like Economy, Fleet, Tech or Diplomatic Weight. We have also added two new Challenge Types: one which is a bidding process where you spend ECs to become the president, and another one which is an academic thesis. We will definitely show off all these things in more detail on a stream sometime in the future.

These are not all of the questions that we answered, there are a ton more on our forums, which you can check out here!

Hello everyone!

We’re finally back at the office and we’re very excited to be back working on Federations! We will be continuing to focus on AI and stability, while also polishing our features. As a couple of examples of something we are working on right now; we are looking at the economic AI as well as making more unique behaviors for the end game crisis AI. As we continue polishing we’ll also be making improvements here and there.

To share some polish progress, as one example, we’ve added a new slavery type called Indentured Assets, which will be a part of the Utopia (as its a part of the expanded species rights). We wanted to have a slavery type that works better for your more dystopian and evolved empires, which has a greater need for many specialists.


While slaves only have 25% political power of free pops, indentured assets will retain 75%.

As promised before vacations, we will be doing a number of Q&A sessions related to different topics. The first Q&A will be about the Federation Rework and you can already post your questions in our forum thread here. We will be answering some of your questions next week, on Jan 23rd.

Future topics:

• Jan 23rd: Federation rework Q&A
  
• Jan 30th: Galactic Community Q&A
  
• TBA: Diplomacy Q&A
  
• TBA: Origins Q&A
  
• TBA: Mega shipyard & juggernaut Q&A

The reason why we cannot release an exact schedule right now is because there might be dev diaries related to other topics between the Q&A ones. The thread for collecting your questions will always be posted one week in advance.

We are looking forward to answering your questions and showing off more of Federations during the coming weeks!

Hello everyone!

Christmas is fast approaching, and before the team disappears for some well-deserved rest, we thought it would be good to sum up the year and share some thoughts.

2019 has been a challenging year for us, with many different challenges that we’ve had to tackle. The year began with an extended period of patching, which had us starting on a bad footing. We had a lot of issues to address, but we also had plans for the year, plans that included small side projects as well as developing new content for the game.

The year made it clear that we need to slow down and refocus our efforts, because we’ve been running at a high pace for too long now. We are working hard with Federations to make sure we have time to address any outstanding issues, and to make the expansion a great release.

Our communication hasn’t been the best during the year either, and a lot comes down to us not having a lot to communicate (as we were busy working on things), and that we decided to use PDXCON for all our announcements. Next year we hope to be better, and as mentioned previously, we will be starting 2020 with a bunch of Q&A dev diaries related to different topics each week. The schedule for the Q&A will be posted next year, with our first dev diary on January 16th. Our plans for 2020 are looking very good, and we’re very excited for the future.

In dev diary #141 I outlined some of the concepts that I wanted to explore for the game. Let’s take a look at some of the things we’ve achieved:

Pop growth: Look into how immigration/emigration works, try to make base growth across multiple planets less powerful, make habitability matter more again

Sectors & automation: Allow players to nudge which sectors planets belong to, reduce micromanagement by improving sector management tool.
- A lot of work has been done with this, such as creating sectors, manual designations and planet automation. All work isn’t finished however, and we want to add more improvements.

Backgrounds: Split up some civics into backgrounds, and add more backgrounds.
- This is being implemented as Origins, and we’re very happy with how much value this adds to the game.

Civic flavour: Spend more time on making the civics feel more unique and fun.
- We’ve done some work towards this, but we don’t consider it finished yet. There are still a bunch of Civics we would like to make more fun.

Institutions: Define which institutions make up your empire’s internal departments (such as Diplomatic Corps, Xenology Bureau etc.), and their funding, size and power.

Espionage: Intel to determine how much you know about another empire, spy actions, cloaking, sabotage & general mischief.

Religion & Cults: Similar to factions, cults could appear in your empire during certain circumstances. Spiritualist empires would most likely have “imperial” cults. Worship of powerful entities etc.

Archaeology: Explore the ruins of ancient civilizations.
- We added Archaeology in Ancient Relics, and we’re very happy with how the system allows us to tell stories in chapters.

Subject contracts: Allow overlords to better customize what type of subjects they have, tribute levels, benefits to subject etc.

Federation depth: Allow federations to level up, have different election types, taxes etc.
- This will be done with the reworked Federation system coming with the 2.6 update next year.

Galactic Council: Create a sort of a ‘space UN’ with galactic politics and diplomacy.
- This will be done with the Galactic Community coming with the 2.6 update next year.

Primitives: Allow for more interactions with primitive pre-FTL species

With everything we’ve been working on during 2019, we will be adding a lot of depth and customization to Stellaris. We are especially looking forward to when you all get a chance to play with Origins and the Galactic Community.

And because we can’t have a dev diary without some sort of sneak peak, we will show you this:



The previous design that we outlined in dev diary #158 showed Strongest (Economy) and Diplomatic Weight as two succession types. We weren’t entirely happy with that, so we have separated the Strongest Succession Type from which category is used to determine who is the strongest. Setting Strongest as the Succession Type now requires High Centralization. The cool thing is that this now allows you to have a Research Cooperative federation that is led by whichever empire has the best technology.


Producer Switch
And now a message from Jamor:

Hi all. Firstly, I want to wish you all a happy and safe holiday season. Play lots of video games, spend time with your loved ones, and start 2020 in the best style.

I became the producer (called Project Lead back then) of Stellaris back in February 2017. While I wasn’t new to the games industry, for me it was an amazing moment to finally work on the sort of hardcore, deeply nerdy strategy games that I myself played at home (having started with Paradox games in 2007 with HOI 2). I look back upon the starry-eyed character who wrote this and reflect upon the journey so far: contributing to three full expansions, three story packs, and two species packs, seeing the title through absolutely massive changes, and all in all patching on 37 separate occasions - some great, some not so hot (I’m sure some of you remember the great dawning of galactic peace that arose from the 1.6 patch, by the simple expedient of making the AI actually incapable of declaring war). All in all it’s been the most intense and memorable era of my career in this crazy industry.

The only constant is change, however, so now I’m moving over as producer to Imperator: Rome. They are a great bunch of folks who are bringing out the immense potential of that game more and more, in the classic Paradox style. It is my honour to lead them forward as the game continues to grow and evolve.

Of course that means I’m leaving my beloved Stellaris team. After sharing so many experiences, some magic, some tragic, it is not without emotion that I do this. But ultimately, you cannot keep doing the same thing forever, and I’m eager to get started on this new challenge. I want to thank my guys, who have so fearlessly and loyally pushed on towards the objective no matter what. I also want to thank you, the fans, without whom there would be no Paradox, and as a fellow fan reaffirm my commitment that I’ll always do the best I can, on whatever team I’m in, to uphold our Special Secret Thing (™). We’re Paradox, we’re different from everyone else, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it. Obidobi will take over leadership of the Stellaris team, and he has my complete confidence.

Now, I turn in my laser, and gird on my gladius. LETS GO PDS!

A message from Obidobi:

Hello everyone!

I'm Obidobi, some of you may have seen me around as I've been working at Paradox (and Stellaris for that matter) for the past 5 years. I started my journey as a newcomer to the gaming industry as a Paradox QA in 2014 where I saw Stellaris in its pre-alpha stage and I've been on this spaceship ever since. In 2018 I joined the producer team helping Jamor on Stellaris and some other projects, including the Console Edition of Stellaris. Stellaris is basically running through my veins at this point, and I don't think I'll know what to do if I ever move projects. So as my dear mentor Jamor leaves for more ancient lands, like any proper Shounen Protagonist, I will have to pick up the mantle of Hokage and become stronger than ever before (Look forward to these kinds of references).

I'm really looking forward to see where the team and I can take Stellaris going forward and I'm truly excited about getting an opportunity to hold the steering wheel. I hope you guys will accept me with open arms as you did with Jamor!

I hope you’re all as excited as I am for the future, but for now I just want to wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year!

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That is all for this week and the year! We will be back again on January 16th!

Remember you can also read this Dev Diary and comment on our forums.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Hello everyone!

Today we’ll be talking about some big stuff – namely the Juggernaut and the Mega Shipyard.

Both of these new behemoths are a part of the upcoming Federations expansion.

Juggernaut
Stellaris has been in development for many years and, and if there’s something we know for sure its that big ships are cool, and bigger ships are even cooler. With this flawless logic in mind, we obviously wanted to add something even bigger than a Titan.

Mobile starbases is something that we know has been widely requested, so why not hit two avians with one lithoid?


Visually, the Juggernaut has the shape of a giant pair of wings.
​
The juggernaut is as much a mobile starbase as it is a massive warship. Although the Juggernaut works like a mobile starbase in some regards, it will not project borders or control ownership or systems. A Juggernaut instead functions like a forward base of operations during offensive campaigns where you can repair your ships. The Juggernaut will not have starbase modules or buildings – instead it will count as always having 2 Shipyards (which means it can build, repair and upgrade ships).



The Juggernaut can be designed in the ship designer, and features 2 XL turrets, 6 hangar slots and 5 medium turrets.

​

In addition, the Juggernaut gets access to a couple of new and unique aura components.



The Juggernaut will be unlocked by a technology which requires Citadels and Battleships to be already researched. A Starbase will also need to have a Colossal Assembly Yard in order to be able to construct one. The Colossal Assembly Yard is required for (and unlocked by) both the Colossus and the Juggernaut.




The Juggernaut will have an empire limit of 1.

Mega Shipyard
New Megastructures are always nice, because we all want more ways to show off the glory and magnificence of our empires. The Mega Shipyard is exactly what it is, a giant shipyard that allows you to build a lot of ships really fast.



The Mega Shipyard will also provide ships with +100 starting XP, so that it will not matter where you build them. Generally speaking, are trying to avoid design that creates incentives for players to engage in more micromanagement that may not be fun. We believe the choice of where to build a ship (because it would cost less, or gain more XP somewhere) is an example of micromanagement that is not very fun. The only incentive is to avoid loss aversion, which is not a good. Incentives should generally be positive.



The Mega Shipyard is unlocked by a technology which requires Mega-Engineering (like the others). It’s found in the Society tree and belongs to the Military Theory category.



The Mega Shipyard will have 3 stages (in addition to construction site):
Mega Shipyard Framework - 10 Shipyards, +33% Ship Build Speed, +100 Starting Ship XP
Mega Shipyard Core - 20 Shipyards, +66% Ship Build Speed, +100 Starting Ship XP
Mega Shipyard - 30 Shipyards, +100% Ship Build Speed, +100 Starting Ship XP

The bonuses to Ship Build Speed will be empire-wide.

Keep in mind that these numbers are work-in-progress and may change.

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That is all for this week! Next week will be the last dev diary of the year, before the holidays, and we will be doing a round up of the year.

Also keep an eye on our social media channels, as we will be sharing some more screenshots of the Juggernaut and Mega Shipyard.

As always, you can also read this Dev Diary and comment on our forums.