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.


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.


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.

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!

Hello Stellaris Community!

We’re pleased to announce the Stellaris 3.0.3 Open Beta is Now Live. This open beta includes changes to the new population growth system introduced in 3.0.1, to address some of the concerns raised by players about the population growth mid to late game.

To opt-in to the open beta branch, right click Stellaris, click Properties, Beta tab, and choose “Stellaris_test” from the drop down.
Please leave your feedback on these new changes in the the Pop Growth Feedback Megathread here

We are always looking for feedback from our Community, and regularly incorporate community feedback into our future development plans.

We hope you’re enjoying Nemesis, and thank you for your patience while we further refine pop growth.

Hello Stellaris Community!

We’ve seen a number of your reports regarding the pop growth mechanics included in the 3.0 Update. We’ve been reviewing this feedback, and including it in our post-launch support for 3.0.

Here’s how we’ve decided to handle it:
This week (date to be confirmed) we will be publishing an open beta that includes a revision of some of the population growth changes. The objective behind the changes introduced in the 3.0.3 Open Beta is to address some of the concerns raised by the community regarding mid and late game population growth.


When the open beta branch goes live, you can opt-in to the beta by right clicking Stellaris, click Properties, Beta tab, and choose “Stellaris_test” from the drop down.

We will do a further post when this branch becomes available. We are committed to gathering additional feedback and will consider incorporating this feedback into our development moving forward.

We hope you’re enjoying Nemesis, and thank you for your patience while we further refine pop growth.

Hello everyone!

We hope that you’ve all had a chance to enjoy the 3.0 ‘Dick’ Update and Nemesis. We’ve had a lot fun making it, and it's been really fun to see your reactions to all the new stuff!

We appreciate all the feedback and bug reports you have submitted, as it really helps us improve the game. 3.0.2 is looking to be quite stable as it currently stands, with better performance and a very low amount of out-of-syncs in multiplayer. There are still bugs and improvements that we want to make and the current plan is to fix bugs and make improvements for a couple of weeks more, until we can release a 3.0.3.

For that patch we’ll be looking at things like:

• Some improvements relating to Operations & Espionage
  
• Tweaking and making improvements related to pop growth
  
• Various other improvements, balance tweaks and bugs

We also know that pop growth has been a heartfelt issue for some of you, so we wanted to take this opportunity to address some of that feedback. With that I’ll hand the word over to our Game Designer Stephen to talk a bit more about pop growth in detail:

"The Stellaris 3.0 ‘Dick’ update had a number of changes to economic systems, including major changes to population growth. We wanted to significantly reduce the number of pops in the galaxy and decrease the disparity of number of pops between empires with mass colonization and those with fewer focused planets, allowing smaller empires to keep pace to a degree with more sprawling empires. (The eternal struggle between wide and tall play.)

As part of this, we made some changes to increase economic output of individual pops or other sources through various means - some technologies were buffed, edicts were updated, and new bonuses were added to keep production up. Some secondary resources, such as Research, are intentionally more difficult to rush, since we believe that in 2.8 it was a bit too easy to reach repeatable technologies and technological dominance.

We do recognize that putting limitations on the previously endless growth can feel bad, and that the large number of sudden changes can be shocking. Internally, we’ve been playing with the system for months, and know that while it will take a transition period to get used to some of the changes, we believe that these changes are better for improving the long-term playing experience.

That said, months of internal testing pales in comparison to a week of live play, and the feedback we’ve received from you have been integral for us to continue to improve the playing experience and has led to some adjustments we want to make. Balancing complex systems are an ongoing process so we encourage you to continue feedbacking here on the forums as we move forward.

While we were interested in having more backwater planets in proportion to highly developed planets, we've deemed it too difficult to get to the higher infrastructure tiers. As such, we're planning on reducing the number of pops necessary to upgrade capital buildings to the higher tiers.

The growth on highly developed worlds also felt a little low, so we've increased the floor of how low logistic growth penalties can drop planetary growth, to make sure that these planets still produce a low but noticeable amount of growth. The effect on growth required from the number of pops in the empire was stagnating growth too early, so we're adjusting that value down as well. These should help make late game worlds like a Ring World or Ecumenopolis less difficult to populate, though you may still want to encourage your pops to resettle to them to get them going.

To ensure that other special planets such as the Hive World and Machine World still feel valuable when they come online, we've added assembly jobs to the planets themselves. (The Resource Consolidation origin will begin with a blocker negating this extra job until removed.)

Since colonization is taking longer than desired in the mid to late game, we've added Colony Development Speed bonuses to the civilian infrastructure technologies in addition to their Building Slots.

There's been a lot of positive feedback regarding the new automatic resettlement mechanics, so we're looking at changing the functionality of the Slave Processing Plant to expand automatic resettlement to slaves on the planet at a reduced rate instead of providing production bonuses. So much paperwork.

Constructobots have requested Building Slot parity with Functional Architecture, and we can yielded to their demands. The bio-trophies of the Rogue Servitors have also been shown some educational programs to help them multiply. And as a quality of life request from the Prosperously Unified, we're extending the duration of the homeworld buff to 20 years."

-----

Please note that this is not a comprehensive list of all the changes we’re looking into for 3.0.3, but rather some of the highlights.

That is all for this week folks! We hope you enjoy the game, and continue giving constructive feedback so that it’s easier for us to keep improving the game.

Please note that this is not a comprehensive list of all the changes we’re looking into for 3.0.3, but rather some of the highlights.

That is all for this week folks! We hope you enjoy the game, and continue giving constructive feedback so that it’s easier for us to keep improving the game.

Hello everyone!

We hope all of you are enjoying Nemesis, a lot of work went into this patch and expansion. Countless hours to bring you what is, in my personal opinion, one of the best and most stable releases in Stellaris history! However, regardless of how much effort you put into something being flawless, there will always be some small cracks that get missed.

With this hotfix we hope to bring you a quicker patch of some of those larger cracks. This is intentionally a very small patch to make sure that we could get these specific issues fixed and delivered to you all sooner rather than later. Rest assured though that we have another patch in the works, so please continue providing us with feedback and bug reports (over at the Bug Forum)!

• Fixed an issue with the Big Red Button achievement not triggering before the game ended.
  
• Fixed an issue where players couldn't play as the pre-scripted Human Empires.
  
• Fixed an issue with Criminal Syndicates branch offices producing super negative trade due to crime, then multiplying it because of crime.

Known Issue: The Branch Office Breakdown tooltip for Criminal Syndicates does not include their planetary bonuses. The final value displayed in the UI is correct however.

Before I leave you I want to address two other issues briefly. First, we've seen the reports about various graphical flickering issues, we're currently working on a fix for that but we couldn't get it into this specific hotfix. But we'll make sure to provide a fix for it as soon as we can!

Secondly, I want to briefly touch on an aspect of the big economic rework we’ve done to improve the game – including the pop growth rebalancing. Please continue to give us constructive feedback and keep your messages civil, but don't spam random threads with hateful comments. Those will not be tolerated. We are continuously collecting your feedback and it will help us make tweaks to these complex systems. We are planning to address some of the feedback in the upcoming Dev Diary scheduled for Thursday!

Ladies and gentlemen, the moment you've all been waiting for is here!

Nemesis and the 3.0.1 'Dick' update should now be live on Steam and all other platforms!

As mentioned yesterday in an impromptu Dev Diary (here), in the update we have also included a patch for 3.0.0. Which is why we're releasing Nemesis as a 3.0.1. This is something we've done in the past, and all it means is that we're bringing you all more fixes than ever!

You can find the change logs for both 3.0.0 and 3.0.1 versions here

Please note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important 2.8.1 game going, please roll back to that version before trying to load the save in 3.0.1. You can roll back to a prior version via right click on Stellaris in library -> Properties -> Betas -> choose the desired version.

If you want to play crossplay multiplayer with your friends on non-steam platforms you can opt into the "crossplay" branch in Steam in the same way as above.

We're super excited for this release and we hope that our hard work will bring you hours of entertainment!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUhb-XUgjuU

Hello everyone!

Hopefully this will come as a pleasant surprise to all of you! Last week I posted the changelog for 3.0.0 and talked a bit about the fact that we were already working on the 3.0.1. The details I left out were that we were actually close to being done, but for the sake of not making promises I wouldn't be able to keep, I decided that I would err on the side of caution. However, now that the 3.0.1 has gone through all the necessary checks and processes I am happy to announce that we will launch Nemesis, and by extension the 3.0 'Dick' Patch, with this 3.0.1 patch!

This means that there will never be a 'live' version of the 3.0.0., and instead you will all receive all the fixes that we've worked on for the 3.0.1. in addition to the massive changelog of the 3.0.0. For some perspective, the 3.0.1 contains roughly 8 pages of fixes and balancing, bringing the entire 3.0.0 and 3.0.1 to roughly 27 pages of new content, balancing changes, UI tweaks, AI fixes, Improved Stability, many new modding features, and of course general bug fixes.

So the moment you have all been waiting for, here's the changelog for the 3.0.1 that will be released tomorrow along side Nemesis!

• Added several new diplomatic messages for Becoming the Crisis empires

• A wormhole now connects Scions to their Fallen Empire overlords.
  
• Aetherophasic Engine now grants increasing amounts of energy, minerals and Naval Capacity with each upgrade.
  
• Scaled down the Unity rewards of various espionage events which now award a value based on existing, monthly Unity income.
  
• Imperial Security Directorate updated such that it now offers the Emperor +2 to Decryption and +4 to Encryption only.
  
• Reverted change to special resource edicts' one-time costs: their costs now increase with empire sprawl as well as overextension, as opposed to just overextension. Also clarified the tooltip a bit.
  
• The new Special Projects for the final step in the base game Precursor event chains now take 30 days to research.
  
• The Indentured Servitude slavery type no longer applies Slavery based production modifiers if the pop is working in a Specialist job. Other slavery based modifiers such as reduced Housing and Amenity usage continue to apply.
  
• Lowered chance of Unbidden spawning as they can spawn early, so were appearing a lot more often than other crises
  
• Reintroduced Slave Processing Facility requirement to recruiting Slave Armies.

• Fixed potential CTD when partial failure to connect to host in MP view.
  
• Stopped research_all_technologies console command from crashing the game.
  
• Right click unassigning a spymaster envoy no longer desyncs the game in MP.
  
• Improved efficiency of the code for picking what to build via planetary automation scripts.
  
• Reduced the “destroy galaxy” performance impact by not destroying each pop individually.
  
• Remade destroy colony so it is destroying any pops before changing owner/controller to no country just to reduce the amount of per pop calculations.
  
• Removed ai_weight fields from buildings, as the AI was periodically evaluating whether they added up to less than -1 (which they never did) to see if they should be destroyed. (Note: ai_weights were replaced by economic_plans so were not used for evaluating which building to build; note 2: if for some reason as a modder you really want to use them, you can still do so by disabling economic_plans)
  
• Fixed crash on Linux when joining a game through steam friends while the game was running.

• Filter out ill suited empires from the top right target Empire drop down in the Diplomacy view. E.g. The Shroud and Curator Enclaves.
  
• Galactic focus selection window is now hidden when changing tab in the galactic community.
  
• Rename Build ship and Build Defensive Platforms buttons on Starbases and Megastructures to Open catalog, which better describes the actual action.
  
• Disable newly renamed Open catalog buttons in Starbase and Megastructure ship builder UI when they have no effect.
  
• The Special Deposit tooltip now lists the effects that the special deposits have.
  
• UX rehaul of the MP Game Lobby making it clearer what to do and who's ready.
  
• Excavation sites are now greyed out when fully excavated.
  
• Remade planet view locked building slot tooltip to refer to actual capital building name and district with highest building slot add modifier
  
• Details for fleet, pops, economy, and technology are now hidden in the breakdown of diplomatic weight if you don't have enough intel
  
• Tidied up the tooltip for a planet's habitability in the planet's interface to clearly state what each number is.
  
• Intel value text should now be displayed better in all languages.
  
• The espionage operation categories filter is now hidden if there are less than 2 operations available.
  
• Only showing espionage operation category filters for potential and/or ongoing operations
  
• You can now use "go to capital" on Marauders in the Contacts menu (it will take you to their home system).
  
• If you have sufficient intel, hovering over the button to form or cancel a research agreement will now tell you how many technologies you and the other country may learn from it.
  
• Hovering over the button to form or cancel a commercial agreement now tells you how many credits you will gain from it (rather than you having to propose the agreement to find out).
  
• When you are offered a commercial agreement, you will now hear about the energy credit benefits.
  
• Removed superfluous "Are you the baddie?" tooltip for the Crisis tab, only displayed when not Becoming the Crisis.
  
• Improved consistency of Diplomatic Stance policy options being hidden or unavailable; visibility is now determined by government type and DLC ownership, while other factors determine availability.
  
• Changed tooltip for starbase buildings/modules in starbase view buildables to show calculated value and hide base if value is not affected by modifier.
  
• The tooltip for Crisis Objectives now contains information for how much Menace you have gained from this Objective.
  
• Added variety to the "unknown species" cardboard cutout in the first contact interface.
  
• Fixed inappropriate line breaks in "Intel" labels for some languages,
  
• Show diplomatic pacts an Empire has even if they're only known via a second hand Intel source. E.g. You having high Intel on A and thereby knowing it has a Commercial Pact with B will now show that Commercial Pact in the diplomacy view of B even if you don't have full Intel on all of B's diplomatic pacts.
  
• Cost/upkeep/production breakdown tooltip should not show mult modifiers for "empty" resources.
  
• Opinion map mode now properly hides opinion breakdowns unless enough Intel is gained.

• AI war strategies are now recalculated more often to make it respond better to changes in ally fleets.
  
• The AI now better accounts for the value of different resources when deciding what to buy on the market.
  
• Allow the AI to trade with Living Metal, Dark Matter, and Zro on the market.
  
• Added cooldown before AI considers responding to a proposal, set in define DIPLOMACY_RESPONSE_COOLDOWN_DAYS
  
• Increased randomness when AI responds to proposals, will still do a daily roll if it should but chance for responding starts at none and then rapidly increases each day until proposal expiration date.
  
• The AI now better take into consideration that Federation and GDF ships have no upkeep when deciding which ships to build.
  
• The independent GDF AI will now remember which capital systems it has visited upon reloading a save file.

• Added on_army_killed_in_combat / no_combat on_actions.
  
• Using "pop" scope change in army scope now takes you to the pop that spawned the army.
  
• Added export_resource_income_to_variable effect.
  
• Added export_trigger_value_to_variable_effect.
  
• Added trigger is_current_first_contact_stage.
  
• Fixed various issues with setting species archetype restrictions for government elements (civics, authorities) so that it is now checked in every case and can be used safely.
  
• Enabled triggered descriptions and gametext ([ ] commands) in espionage operation descriptions.
  
• Fixed a bug in scripted effects/triggers that meant that you'd get weird startup errors if you ever used more than one "[" in a scripted effect/trigger.
  
• Added is_total_war trigger.
  
• Fixed issue where owned_species and enslaved_species scope script lists would not always work in planet events.
  
• Added abort trigger on espionage operation type for killing of an active operation.
  
• Added has_active_building trigger (checks if a planet has the building in a non-ruined and non-disabled state).
  
• Added effect for postponing modifier calculations, useful when executing a lot of effects where individual result of them is not important.
  
• Fixed cases of missing modifier names (where a modifier would show up as "<blank>: +X") in pop jobs (triggered modifiers) and deposits (country modifiers).
  
• Fixed any_owned_species so it also works on day 1 of a new game now.
  
• Added remove_invalid_civics option to change_government effect to force incompatible civics to be removed from the government.
  
• Made is_majority_species make sense.
  
• Fixed some minor documentation issues brought to our attention by eagle-eyed modders.

• Fixed rare case of frontend background not covering the entire screen.
  
• Fix occasional fullscreen flickering when running with the -dx11 flag.
  
• Zro Distillation now always becomes a tech option if Extradimensional Experimentation resolution is enacted.
  
• Removed superfluous information about default country types in the tooltip for forming a research agreement.
  
• Event "The Fumes Lie Thick" now tells you about the scientist's new trait.
  
• Fixed an issue where habitat auto-designation would not pick energy specialisation when that was clearly the right choice.
  
• Fixed some grammar errors in "Wind Back and Proceed" archaeology event.
  
• Molluscoid Integration event now no longer refers to "tiles" (what on earth is a tile?? :) ). It now also only gives you 6 new pops.
  
• Fixed an issue where the special project fail event "Smuggler Weapons Trade" would talk about a spaceship rather than a planet.
  
• Fixed Machine Synchronicity Traditions lacking a line break at the end, causing it to be fairly unreadable.
  
• Fixed an issue where you could break the Necrophage origin by having your prepatent species as a subspecies of the main species
  
• Random Spy Network event "An Operative Resurfaces" no longer refers to the empire's leader getting hands-on in extraction of operatives, and preparing security reports.
  
• Added a missing tooltip from random Operations event "Excess Noise".
  
• Corrected a missing tooltip from Spy Network event "Hostile Infiltration Detected".
  
• Leaving federations through events no longer generates opinion penalties unless we deliberately want those penalties set.
  
• Resolutions to repeal the banning of slave trade now have their correct icons.
  
• Corrected Fallen Empires in their mistaken assumption that they have 16 building slots instead of 12 on their starting planets.
  
• Added various government types which were not fully recognized by VIR during the first stage of the tutorial.
  
• Selecting an Oligarchic authority type with the Death Cult civic is now consistently recognized as a Grim Council government.
  
• Fixed several cases where Alloy Mega-Forges and other similar buildings providing +X jobs per Y district would sometimes be unspecific or wrong about how many jobs they'd get from you building which district.
  
• Fixed several fallen empires lacking housing due to having no city districts.
  
• You can no longer get the “Scandalous Insult” event on yourself.
  
• Improved tooltip for when a Spy Network has become overextended.
  
• Subjects that are in a federation with their overlord should now be able to declare a war for independence on them.
  
• Make diplo action positive/neutral/negative background shown in UI again.
  
• Reanimated Armies is now fully incompatible with Synthetic Ascension, rather than just quietly doing nothing as before.
  
• Cosmic Nudge arc site now no longer gives you 10% progress on a habitability tech way beyond what you have researched (essentially useless as it costs so much), but instead gives you progress on the next tech in that line that you can research
  
• First Contact event "A Terrible Sight to Behold" no longer shows a happy handshake as its event picture
  
• Guarantee independence now displayed properly in the diplomacy view (them guaranteeing our independence does not make it work the other way around).
  
• The tooltip for Society Management now correctly mentions the Crisis tab if the player has Nemesis installed.
  
• Fixed a reference to the "Traditions and Relics" interface in the tutorial (it is now "Society Management").
  
• Fixed AIs unintentionally spawning Advanced Empires through the Lost Colony origin even when Advanced AI Starts have been disabled by the player.
  
• Galaxy Generator now uses correct starbase types for marauders and FE when it needs to connect the empire through a non owned system.
  
• Fixed the AI sometimes having sectors with no planets in them.
  
• Operation Arm Privateers may only be conducted against the same target once every 3 years. The operation will conclude early if another empire has successfully armed the brigands before you have.
  
• If the other side finishes the first contact site before you, but you had successfully started a hostile first contact event chain and were merely awaiting the outcome (e.g. completing the vivisection), you will now get the rewards and flavour event anyway.
  
• Operation event "Smear Campaign Exposed" now makes references to the proper empires in its description.
  
• Reworked the final step of the Vultaum, Yuht, First League, Irassian, and Cybrex precursor chains. They now provide a one-day Special Project on the discovered homeworld rather than the last event being fired on-survey. This should improve visibility and increase robustness in situations where e.g. the star system changes ownership or is colonized.
  
• Added bespoke event descriptions for scenarios in which Operation Spark Diplomatic Incident is conducted against a target who, in turn, causes offense to your own empire.
  
• Fixed some cases of starbases incorrectly respawning on loading a save.
  
• AI will now give AI full rights in some circumstances.
  
• Fixed Adaptability Tradition "Survival of the Fittest" not using its own art.
  
• Fixes a bug in events not creating random outcomes properly in some cases.
  
• Fixed missing event title when declaring Tiyanki to be galactic pests (frankly uncalled for).
  
• Clarified some references to target Encryption in events "Contact Lost" and "A Surprise Catch".
  
• Votes now display as a popup so that they are not as easily missed and auto-declined.
  
• Empires who receive the event "An Operative Resurfaces" and who maintain a Spy Network on the empire in question are now able to attempt an extraction of said operative, assuming they have a sufficient Infiltration Level.
  
• "An Operative Resurfaces" events are now part of a more easily trackable event chain.
  
• Removed various instances of an extra exclamation mark appearing in notification messages.
  
• Added a prolog step to the tutorial for establishing First Contact. Players will now be directed to the Situation Log in order to begin the process.
  
• Fixed a case where you sometimes wouldn't get the Does Not Compute achievement if multiple countries' fleets were bombarding the last AI planet.
  
• Wipe Em Out war goal will now no longer destroy starbases that previously belonged to your vassals, but will instead return them.
  
• Fixes num_species and num_unique_species triggers. This affected, but is not limited to the Tourist Trap achievement not working.
  
• Fixed an edge case where The Surveyor relic would rarely fail to spawn a resource deposit.
  
• Fixed a trigger check in Operation Smear Campaign which may not produce the expected results for campaigns involving xenophilic empires.
  
• Refined script for Operation Smear Campaign such that it should now be able to handle multiple campaigns targeting the same empire at once.
  
• Fixed an error in which targets of Operation Smear Campaign who do not have an active Spy Network may fail to receive any event at all, and thus would not have any of their opinions changed.
  
• Fixed a faulty reference to the country being targeted by Arm Privateers in the notification event, "Privateers Already Engaged".
  
• Fixed broken Go To buttons in a couple of Caravaneer events.
  
• Fixed Xenophobes welcoming aliens with open arms in the "Caravaneers: A warm welcome!" event.
  
• Scripts which may apply reinforcements for the Galactic Defense Force on an annual basis are now only enacted so long as a playable country remains a member of the Galactic Community.
  
• Improved a tooltip on the Operations panel, explaining when and why Crisis Beacon is subject to a cooldown period.
  
• Fixed a reference to the Spymaster in localisation, for the finalé event in which Operation Crisis Beacon is set to work on the Unbidden.
  
• Fixed an error which caused the random Operations event "Snuffed Out" not to fire "Hostile Infiltration Detected", if the empire in question falls foul of their target's Encryption level.
  
• Auto-upgrade for Federation and GDF ship designs now properly applies the technology of all member empires when choosing components.
  
• Fixed planetary automation sometimes failing to build anything if there was unemployment but multiple free jobs.
  
• Fixed several edge cases where precursor systems could spawn outside of your borders.
  
• * Fixed an exploit where you could mod the game to get a button giving 500 minerals for free without changing the checksum.
  
• Fixed dialog references to the Great Khan's vanquisher in "The Great Khan Meets Defeat", such that even an unknown empire is referred to by its proper name.
  
• Fixed the tooltip for the event when you Become Emperor showing erroneous information if you did so as a Gestalt of Megacorp empire.
  
• Updated modifier names when switching ruler since title is depending on ruler and heir roles.
  
• Fixed a scripted check which is used to ascertain whether or not the empire in question has an active Spy Network.
  
• Fixed missing modifier name for tradition swap tr_diplomacy_insider_trading_megacorp (Insider Trading as a Megacorp) - made it correctly inherit the parent's modifier name.
  
• Fixed envoy event "Gone Native" sometimes missing a description entirely.
  
• Fixed the tooltip for Pop Assembling Capacity (below Pop Assembly in the planet interface) not showing all information and not taking into account organic assembly.
  
• Fixed a bug where buildings that increased the number of jobs offered by other buildings or districts would do this even if they were ruined or disabled.
  
• Fixed it being possible to recruit Imperial Legions infinitely (it is now capped to 12).
  
• Fixed event icons in event for opening communications presenting wrong information when concerning Fallen Empires.
  
• Fixed Subterranean Refugees event failing to create a pop.
  
• Fixed information for resource gain from Commercial Pacts while proposing it showing the information the wrong way around, i.e. it would say the other side would get what you would get and vice versa.
  
• Curbed the Galactic Emperor's extreme paranoia - not everyone is a seditionist (i.e. the Emperor can now only run the Operation Target Seditionists against rivals and countries actually undermining their authority).
  
• "Leviathan Down" anomaly event now gives the planet a Metal Boneyard deposit if it is inhabited, instead of granting an unlocalised one meant for orbital deposits.
  
• Made the "Falling Intel" alert more helpful.
  
• Improved a descriptor for relatively weak encryption/decryption.
  
• Fixed the Mineral Extraction Operation's mining stations proving an insurmountable obstacle to AI expansion.
  
• You now no longer gain menace per month while purging, but instead upon a pop finishing being purged.
  
• Enabled the overlay for assigning envoys in Spy Network view.
  
• Fixed a Crisis Beacon operation event falling back to the wrong event text in a certain situation.
  
• Added indicator for recurring menace objectives.
  
• If you have the "Lost Amoeba" anomaly event, you no longer need to establish communications with space amoebas. That event's options now give you the space amoeba buffs/projects in that case.
  
• Fixed some cases where you could not interact with a colony because it was occupied by factions such as the CARE Mechanocalibrator.
  
• Having claims on a subject now means you can use the Claims casus belli on their overlord.
  
• The "Form Galactic Council" resolution will no longer appear as active after the Galactic Imperium has fallen
  
• When forming the Galactic Council again after it has been abolished, the time until the next election will be the expected 180 days instead of the longer time that is normally between elections
  
• Fixed tutorial sometimes opening and closing in rapid succession.
  
• Fixed an issue where government data of Custodians and Imperium rulers would not be restored when they lose their position.
  
• The AI and player default for very strong syncretic servile slaves is to have them as Chattel rather than as Battle Thralls.
  
• Fixed Isolationist faction's first contact policy demands to be for not having a Proactive policy, rather than for explicitly having an Aggressive one.
  
• Inwards Perfectionists' Materialist faction will no longer demand Research Agreements (since that demand cannot be fulfilled).
  
• Slaves that are working Specialist jobs now gain Specialist production modifiers rather than Worker production modifiers. (Necrophages will no longer suffer penalties in the Specialist tier as Indentured Servants, and the Authoritarian worker bonuses will no longer apply at the Specialist tier either.)
  
• Fixed the Shoot to Kill achievement (its logic was flipped, so you had to be the victim to get it!).
  
• Fixed Sic Semper Tyrannis achievement.
  
• Forming the Galactic Imperium no longer triggers a government cooldown.
  
• Script controlling the expansion of Ancient Mining Drone fleets has been reworked so as to no longer create excessive event scope backlogs.
  
• Mining Drone Expansion Fleet and Aggressive Drone Expansion Fleet have been reworked such that every 10 years, for as long as the Mining Drones persist, 3 fleets will spawn and seek out suitable systems into which they can expand. The fleets favor systems which lie within 1-6 hyperlane jumps from their system of origin.
  
• Fixed an issue where the government would not reform properly when the Imperium is formed if the government had civics that were incompatible with the "Imperial" authority.
  
• Recruitable leaders may no longer possess the Psionic or Chosen trait directly alongside either the Synthetic or Cyborg trait.
  
• Fixed (Become the) Crisis Level 5 sharing one trigger condition with Crisis Level 4.
  
• Script controlling the expansion of Ancient Mining Drone fleets has been reworked so as to no longer create excessive event scope backlogs.
  
• Portraits in the empire designer should now animate properly.
  
• Fixed spawned Star-Eaters having too many shield components instead of armor components, and made sure the owner receives the relevant armor technologies.
  
• Fixed Mass Extinction Through the Ages breaking sometimes in MP.
  
• Fixed duplicate colons in espionage operation tooltips.
  
• A conditional event description for "Final Disavowal", part of the "Disavowed Operative Resurfaces" chain, now displays correctly more often for those who have an active Spy Network, and for those who do not.
  
• Subjects are no longer able to become presidents of federations through rotation or random succession.
  
• Fixed Diplomatic Map Mode leaking information you do not have intel on.
  
• Fixed various error log messages relating to Crisis Objectives, along with several edge cases where the rewards were not granted when they should have been.
  
• Fixed an issue where the acceptance breakdown for diplomatic actions was available even if you didn't have sufficient intel.

Hello there!

We're just about a week away from releasing Nemesis, our next big Expansion for Stellaris. So big in fact, that we're naming it after one of the most renowned Science-Fiction authors, Philip K. Dick, and calling it 3.0! This has been one of the most fun expansions I've personally gotten to work on and I can't wait to see your reactions when you get to play it yourselves!

With this post we're of course bringing you the changelog today, but I also wanted to talk a bit about how we've been handling bigger releases lately and what's going on with Nemesis specifically. For those of you that have followed us for a while, you know that since Federations we internally start working on the first patch for a major release before its actual release date (If you're curious why we do this, you can read about it here).

For Nemesis it's no different, however the patch that we're working on is currently undergoing testing so we cannot yet reveal what's in it, nor when it might become available to you all. But we'll let you know more as soon as we are confident in the build that we have!

But in all honesty, considering how big the 3.0 change log is, it should take you all plenty of time to read through ;) For the full 3.0.0 patch notes see the forum post here!

We've also just released the Expansion feature breakdown video. Watch it now!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOJ26b3906Q

Lastly, don't forget to watch our Stellaris: Nemesis Feature Stream today at 6 PM CEST (5 PM UK, 12 PM EDT, 9 AM PDT) on http://twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive !

Hi! Happy April Fool's Day!

This week we want to show off some of the challenging new Origins that are not coming soon.

The first, titled Surviving the Aftermath, is a variant on Void Dwellers.

The Surviving the Aftermath origin starts with the premise that a construction ship and colony ship were lost in MIA when a Crisis nation activated the Aetherophasic Engine and destroyed the galaxy, and you're left in a habitat to pick up the pieces.


Your home system.

As the galaxy has been destroyed and there are no resources anywhere, we expect this to be an exciting and challenging origin to play.


The local cluster.


The galaxy. So alone. So very alone.

The next is the Crusader King Origin, where you begin the game as the ruler of a primitive civilization in the late medieval time period.


Living in luxury.

This origin starts at a significant tech disadvantage, but our playtests suggest that you should achieve spaceflight within a few hundred years.

Several events have been added in case another empire wishes to enlighten your civilization, as well as a "burn the alien at the stake" minigame.


Includes special diplomatic options!

Winning the game as a Crusader King grants the new Universe Universalis achievement.

The Prison Architect Origin is restricted to Rogue Servitors only, and drastically changes their gameplay. Instead of pampering their organic charges, they seek to collect all organics and like the Criminal Syndicate, are affected by and gain bonuses for having high Crime. They also gain extra Unity for each Criminal Syndicate pop they collect.


Gotta catch ‘em all!

Some minor changes to the Organic Sanctuary.

Open to all empire types, the This is Fine origin has a new twist - your empire thinks it’s hot stuff and is limited to colonizing stars.


Is it warm in here, or is it just me? Looking pretty radiant though.

Your buildings have a chance of being ruined each month due to fires, but your energy production is vastly increased.

Last but not least, the AI Custodianship Origin is our most challenging yet, where you and the AI both control your empire simultaneously. This Origin is also open to all empire types, and represents a fractured leadership or gestalt intelligence where two leaders struggle for power, sometimes issuing contradictory orders. The AI Custodian will act to implement its flawless and foolproof algorithms, undoubtedly bringing your empire success in the long run, if you would only listen to it.


The AI has great plans for my homeworld. The greatest of plans.

That's all for this week. As a reminder, the Stellaris 3.0 'Dick' update and Nemesis arrive two weeks from today on the 15th of April.

What Origins would you create if you wanted a special challenge?