Ever wonder about what goes into Game Design, or the inspiration for the Storytelling aspects of Stellaris?

Game Director Daniel Moregård, Game Designer Stephen Muray, and Content Designer Gemma Thomson have all the answers (from PDXCON).

Watch it here:

Hi everyone!

As grekulf has mentioned, one of our key aims in the upcoming Lem update is to improve the value of our existing DLCs by adding new content to them. As part of this effort, several of our species packs have seen some love. This week, I will start us off by talking about some of the upcoming changes to the Necroids species pack.

While we were overall very happy with the content that went into Necroids (indeed, it has set a high bar for our other species packs to match!), a few of us - both within the team and in the community as a whole - regretted a few of the missed opportunities. The Lem update has provided us with the opportunity to rectify this.

Necrophage Hive Minds

There have been quite a few calls for allowing Hive Minds to be Necrophages, and with Lem, this will now be possible!



They will work similarly to normal Necrophages, but with a few differences:

• Flavour texts that assume individual intelligences have been rewritten to fit the hive theme better
  
• Hive Minds generally cannot support non-Hive individuals within their empire except as Livestock, and Necrophage Hive Minds are no different there. However, unlike other Hive Minds, Necro-Hives will allow their Livestock to procreate. The Livestock can then be subsumed into the Hive via Centers of Elevation.
  
• Unlike normal Necrophages, Necro-Hive Necrophytes don’t use Consumer Goods. Instead, their upkeep of Food (or Minerals, if they are Lithoid) has been doubled.

• Like normal Necrophages, Necro-Hives can also use the Necrophage Purge to speed things up a bit. For this purpose (but in a change applying generally to all Hive Minds), Hive Minds are now allowed to purge Gestalt pops that are not of their main species again.
  
• Making Hive Worlds make sense for Necrophages is a bit complicated, as there was previously a hard block on non-Hive pops living there - the planet would eat them, effectively. The solution we are currently working on is to allow Necro-Hive specifically to bring their Necrophytes there.
  
• Just as you can combine Fanatic Purifier with Necrophage, so you can also be a Devouring Swarm (or Terravore) Necrophage

General Necrophage Changes

It has not escaped notice that Necrophages are quite strong. A lot of the things that make them cool and fun to play also make them very powerful, so it’s a fine line to tread on. However, we have managed to come up with a set of changes that bring them a bit more in line with other starts while maintaining the spirit of the Origin:

• Non-purging Necrophages no longer start with two extra pops than other non-standard origins (purging ones keep the extra pops because they are likely to lose a few pops through purging).
  
• The guaranteed primitive worlds may no longer contain primitives that have advanced beyond the Iron Age (previous limit was Steam Age), and will have more defensive armies than very early primitives usually have. This is to make their start not quite as outright better than other starts.
  
• Centers of Elevation no longer provide stability bonuses, and the job’s unity output has been cut by a quarter.
  
• The chance of pops escaping during Necrophage purging has been increased from 10% to 25%. This is now also communicated to players in tooltips.

Death Cults

In contrast to Necrophages, with the advent of 3.0 and its accompanying pop growth changes, it has been felt that Death Cults - though interesting mechanically and flavour-wise - have somewhat fallen behind the curve in terms of bonuses. In other words, more reward is needed for sacrificing your pops.

One of the issues we had at the time when we implemented it was the limited possibilities for using proper mathematical formulas in Stellaris scripts. However, as hinted in my previous dev diary, that particular bottleneck has now been alleviated (in fact, we have gone considerably further than hinted there - Lem will have a lot of positive surprises for modders!).

Previously, when you chose to sacrifice your populace, you would gain a portion of the bonus as a fixed modifier, and another portion scaled by the raw number of pops you sacrificed. This remains similar, but with one key difference: the scaled modifier is now scaled by the % of your total number of pops you have sacrificed.

We are still working on the exact numbers, but the gist of this is that you will now tend to get a lot better bonuses per pop you sacrifice, especially in the early game.

Reanimated Armies

Changes have also been made to Reanimated Armies. While the fantasy of being able to reanimate corpses to fight for you was pretty cool, in practice the impact of unlocking a new army type - which you had to research a separate technology to unlock - was quite underwhelming. For that reason, a number of changes have been made:

• You can now build Dread Encampments from day 1. Countries starting with the civic will have one on their starting planet
  
• Dread Encampments are generally more useful to have now: they now provide two Necromancer jobs (up from 1), and Necromancers now produce 6 each of society and physics (up from 4), though their number of defensive armies they spawn has been cut from 4 to 3.
  
• Building a Dread Encampment replaces your Defense Armies with Undead Defense Armies, which are somewhat stronger

• When you defeat any organic enemy army in battle, you now have a one in three chance of resurrecting them to join your own forced - in effect immediately spawning an Undead (offensive) Army
  
• Finally, if an empire with Undead Armies defeats the Voidspawn or Tiyanki Matriarch, they can now resurrect them to fight in their own fleets!

That’s all for today. Stay tuned to hear more about our plans for the Lem update!

Hello everyone!

First I want to thank you for the overwhelming support that you’ve shown us with announcing the Custodians initiative. It’s been really fun and motivating to see so many positive responses, and for that we’re truly thankful. At the same time, I must admit that it is also a bit scary in the sense that we shouldn’t have the expectation that this will suddenly resolve any issues you might have with the game, or that we’ll be able to deliver large amounts of significant changes with every update. Let’s appreciate this opportunity and make the best of it :)

Species Pack Gameplay Themes
Last week we already talked about what the Lem Update (honoring the author Stanislaw Lem) would focus on, but I’d also like to go into more detail regarding some things.

We mentioned that we would be adding gameplay to the Humanoids Species Pack and the Plantoids Species Pack, and although I won’t talk about the exact details yet, I do want to talk a little about how we approached it, and the themes we chose.

Plantoids was a bit easier, because there are some obvious fantasies. Going around the themes of growth and plants we’re adding some new traits, civics and origin. We felt like it made sense to open up these gameplay additions to both Plantoid portraits as well as for Fungoids.

Humanoids was a bit trickier, because there are no direct fantasies that apply to them in general, so we instead chose to focus on fantasies that align with things like dwarves, elves, orcs or humans. The Civic we showcased last week was an example of how we made something inspired by a traditionally dwarven fantasy.

Let us know about any ideas or thoughts you have regarding those :)

We will be talking more about these in much greater detail later, but that may possibly be in August.

Game Balance
We’re going to take a look at reworking some of the major outstanding balance issues that we’re having.

One example that I want to talk about is the issue with Research Booming, where power players can essentially outpace other empires due to focusing a lot on research. What enables this is usually Districts that provide Researcher Jobs, which is relatively easy to gain access to early on through Origins such as Shattered Ring or Void Dwellers (the latter not being nearly as strong).

For Shattered Ring we are looking into changing the start from a pure “end-game” Ring World, to be more of an actual “Shattered Ring” that you need to repair before you gain access to the powerful Districts of the Ring World. Putting additional emphasis on the fantasy of resting this ancient megastructure to its former glory can be a fun addition to the Origin itself. Although we haven’t decided exactly what we’re doing, changing the start to be a Shattered Ring that you can restore with the Mega-Engineering technology is a likely route.

Unity & Empire Sprawl

Beyond Lem, we are also going to take a look at Empire Sprawl and Unity. The design for Admin Capacity was never really something that I felt worked out, and we never finished the design that was intended for it. Continuing to use Admin Cap as a mechanic also feels a bit like a dead end due to multiple reasons (ranging from design to technical), so we’re instead going to look into another solution.

I have a design for doubling down on using Unity as the resource for internal management, removing Admin Cap entirely, and to make Empire Sprawl something that you can never mitigate anymore. More sprawling empires will always suffer harsher penalties from Empire Sprawl, and we’ll instead focus on how Unity can be used internally to mitigate some of those penalties. Examples could be Edicts that have a Unity Upkeep Cost, and perhaps reduce the Research Cost Penalty induced by Empire Sprawl. Angry Pops could potentially also have a Unity Upkeep Cost, to represent the drain on your society.

Note that these ideas are very much in their infancy and very prone to change. We will probably start talking a bit more about that once Lem has been released, but I wanted to share some thoughts with you so that we could gather some initial feedback.

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That’s all for this week folks! We’re in the middle of reviewing our dev diary schedule, so we’re hoping to be back with 2 more dev diaries before we take a summer break. We’ll keep you in the loop as we go.

Greetings!

Today I am here to announce some very good news! Stellaris is not slowing down, but rather picking up the pace! We at PDS Green are very happy to announce our new “Custodians” initiative as well as the next free update, coming sometime after summer.

The Custodian Team

Stellaris as a game has been very exploratory, and the game has seen a lot of big changes over the years. I want to start by giving some insight into why we’ve chosen to focus on this initiative.

As we’ve released more expansions we’ve had to take longer and longer between each release, as we’ve needed to spend more time on focusing on quality, making sure each release is as stable as possible. Paradox Development Studio also looks very different today vs. how it looked just a few years ago. Things take longer, there are more processes in place, and there are a lot more people involved. Because each release is now further apart, it makes it harder for us to address some of the outstanding issues that might be affecting the community between DLC releases.

As we’ve added more content it's also been harder to polish and maintain all of the amazing existing content that we’ve added over the years. We want to keep creating new cool experiences for Stellaris, but we also want to be able to maintain a high quality for the base game itself, and for older content.

What we have done now is that we’ve staffed up, and split the Stellaris team into two teams that focus on different aspects of the game. One team, that we call “the Custodians” team, will focus on free updates that we aim to release every 3 months, while the “expansion team” will focus on creating new content for the game.

Examples of what “The Custodians” could be working on:

• Tweaking game balance
  
• Adding new content to old DLC
  
• Polishing existing content
  
• Bug fixes
  
• Performance improvements
  
• AI improvements
  
• Multiplayer stability
  
• UI and quality-of-life improvements

This does not mean that the game will suddenly “be fixed” or done (whatever that means). Together with you, the community, we now have a better opportunity than ever to keep improving the game. In fact, I think working with the community is going to be crucial to really make this work well. We are going to need to improve how we communicate with each other, so that we can better understand each other.

What “The Custodians” initiative is not
It is very important that you understand that “The Custodians” initiative is no magic bullet or quick fix. We’re in this for the long run, and we hope you are too.

We will need to manage our expectations and small, incremental improvements with more regular updates should be our approach.

Honoring Stanislaw Lem

The first free Update, the Lem Update, will be named in honor of the Polish sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem, whose 100th anniversary is being celebrated this year. Stanislaw Lem is famous for works such as Solaris, which has already inspired the Stellaris you know today. The Lem Update is currently scheduled for release sometime after summer.

To set expectations more clearly, the Lem Update will be a bit more ambitious and larger in scope compared to what you can come to expect from “Custodian” updates in the future. The reason is that we’ve had a longer time to work on it than what is planned for future updates. It’s also important to note that as of now, the Lem update is scheduled to be a standalone free update, and will not be associated with a paid DLC.

The Lem Update planned features:

• Buffing the Backlog: We’re reviewing some old DLC to revitalize them with some new content. Humanoids Species Pack and Plantoids Species Packs will now feature some new gameplay features. By the way, did anyone say Necrophage Hive Minds?
  
• Selectable Traditions Trees: You will no longer be locked to the same 7 tradition trees, but you will instead have 7 slots that can be filled with a tradition tree of your choice. The number of tradition trees will be expanded, and previous tradition-tree swaps will be broken out into their own trees (Adaptability will no longer be a swap of Diplomacy for example). Some new tradition trees will also be added to existing DLCs.
  
• Balance Pass: We will be doing a balance pass on some existing gameplay systems and features.
  
• And more..!: Quality of life improvements, bug fixes, AI improvements...

We will go into more detail about these features in future dev diaries, but for now I will leave it at that. We’ll be back next week to talk a bit about some thoughts regarding game balance.


No longer will your empire have to suffer the mediocrity of artisans.

Hi everyone!

Today I want to talk about two things - one is a new experiment that we are running for an alternative ship appearance browser in empire generation, and the other is the Q&A session that we held during PDXCon.


Currently in Empire creation, when selecting the appearance of your ships, we display a preview of a sample ship utilizing your empire's colors.



Current Ship Appearance Selection

We have a bit of an experiment coming that will be rolling out to a portion of you soon that temporarily replaces this with an in-game ship browser that lets you switch between any ship and manipulate them so you can get a better look at them from different angles.


Cropped 3D Ship Preview

In our quest to constantly improve Stellaris we want to measure what impact a change like this can have, so that it would be easier for us to know how to prioritize these kinds of changes in the future. If everything goes well, the change will become permanent for everyone going forwards.

If you end up in the trial, we'd love to hear what you think of it!


During PDXCon, we hosted a developer Q&A session on the PDXCon Discord server, with seven of us answering almost a hundred of your questions. It was a tremendous amount of fun and we hope to be able to schedule more of these. (Most likely on the Stellaris Official Discord server. Join us!)

Here's the transcript of the questions and the answers, as well as a rundown of all the Stellaris panels and activities during this year's PDXCON.

Next week we'll give an early peek at our autumn plans, after which we will take a break from dev diaries for the summer.

See you next week!

Get ready to explore, discover and interact with a multitude of species as you journey among the stars. Forge a galactic empire by sending out science ships to survey and explore, while construction ships build stations around newly discovered planets. Discover buried treasures and galactic wonders as you spin a direction for your society, creating limitations and evolutions for your explorers. Alliances will form and wars will be declared.

An eternal cycle of war, diplomacy, suspicions and alliances await you. Defend or attack with fully customizable war fleets, where adaptation is the key to victory. Choose from an array of complex technologies when designing and customizing your ships with the complex ship designer. You have a multitude of capabilities to choose from to meet the unknown quests that await.

Play for free today!

Hi everyone!

Two big things this week.

The first is that 3.0.3 has moved from beta to live, with the full details available here. 3.0.3 includes numerous economic and AI adjustments, bugfixes, and two new sliders in galaxy generation to control pop growth behavior without the need for a mod.

The other is that PDXCon Remixed, an online adaptation of our annual convention, is kicking off!



We’ve had a variety of events including the Treasure Hunt and Grand Campaign (praise snek) over the past few weeks, but the main events start this weekend.

I’ll list a few of the events of particular interest to Stellaris players, but the entire schedule can be found here.

Friday, 21st of May:

• At 20:00 CEST, the Announcement Show will have all sorts of news and revelations, you can watch at twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive. (The pre-show event starts at 19:30!)

Saturday, 22nd of May:

• At 01:10, Product Marketing Manager Pontus Rundqvist will be hosting a talk called Fanatic Egalitarians: Bringing Stellaris to Consoles with our friends from Tantalus, Producer David Giles, Designer David Doe, and Programmer Adam Clarke.
  
• At 20:00, the Paradox Awards show will be held, honoring the best community in gaming. Modders, community organizers, content creators and more will be highlighted and awarded for their amazing work with all our games.

Sunday, 23rd of May:

• At 00:40, Community Ambassador Graeme “DJ Truthsayer” Crawford will host Defining Your Own Space: Making Great Stellaris Content, featuring some of the brightest stars of Stellaris content creation. ASpec, Enigmatic Rose, Old Man Mordaith, and Stefan Annon will give tips on making fun and engaging videos.
  
• At 02:10, DJ will continue with How to Conquer the Galaxy Without Really Trying, with QA Lead Joseph Gardener, Embedded QA Byron Aytoun, Regunes, UMAR, and Stefan Annon teaching you how to turn a fledgling empire into an intergalactic powerhouse!
  
• At 13:10, make first contact with some of the developers at Meet the Stars: Stellaris Dev Mingle on Discord.
  
• At 14:10, DJ will host Fanatic Xenophiles: Creating Character for Stellaris, featuring Senior Artist Frida Eriksson and Artist Emma Jonsson. See how our worlds are populated with a growing array of fascinating creatures.
  
• 14:55 brings us Fanatic Spiritualists: The Philosophy Behind Stellaris, where Live Content Producer Anders Carlsson grills Game Director Daniel Moregård, Content Designer Gemma Thomson, and myself (Game Designer Stephen Muray) about the stories being told through Stellaris, and how the game is designed to create those stories.
  
• At 15:45, the Fanatic Materialists: A Look at Stellaris Tech panel, featuring Tech Lead Lorenzo Berni, Senior Programmer Gustav Palmqvist, Content Designer and Technical Scripter Pierre Du Plessis, and Former Tech Lead Gwenael Tranvouez will share their insight on how the technology behind Stellaris is created.

That’s not all, see the full list of events here to plan your agenda, with more updates following the Announcement Show.

There'll also be a Stellaris Virtual LAN Party on the Stellaris Discord all weekend! Join to play Community hosted multiplayer games (competitive and roleplay games), learn to play Stellaris from experienced community members, win some game keys, and maybe a chance to Play with a Dev!

Enjoy the convention!

Hello Stellaris Community,

As promised, we have updated the 3.0.3 Open Beta to include the missing non-English localisations that were not included in last week’s update. The new and updated localisations are now included in the Open Beta.

Thank you for your patience and feedback!

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!