Hello everyone!

I’m here to announce a surprise update to the game. But before we get our expectations blown out of proportion, this update contains only a change to our Multiplayer Backend. We are rolling out the Nakama infrastructure to host cross-store PC multiplayer.

With this update we are completely removing our internally developed Multiplayer backend (PDXMP) that is currently used by all stores excluding Steam, which uses the built in Steam backend. The reason for this change is because we believe that Nakama, developed by an external partner, is more stable than our current in-house solution.

What this will mean for you as a player is hopefully nothing different from how you normally play the game. This update should not affect your single player experience whatsoever and if you have the game installed on Steam and don’t have friends on other platforms you won’t be affected by the Multiplayer change either.

The only people this will affect are those of you that play the game on Steam and want to play multiplayer with your friends that have bought Stellaris on other platforms (such as the Microsoft store). You might already know about the crossplay Steam Beta branch we have had in place prior to today, but from this update and forward you will now be able to launch the Crossplay version straight from the launcher!

All you have to do is go into “Game Settings” in the launcher and scroll down to “Cross Store Multiplayer” and click “Launch” as shown below:



If for some reason that doesn’t work, you can also add “-nakama” as a launch option in Steam. Do this by Right-Clicking Stellaris, Going to Properties, General Tab and adding “-nakama” to the Launch Options. This will force the game to switch from the Steam multiplayer backend to the new one for crossplay purposes!




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######################### VERSION 3.0.4 ###########################

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# Performance and Stability

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* Replaced PDXMP multiplayer backend layer with Nakama.

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Thank you for playing Stellaris, and if you experience any issues with Nakama Multiplayer please report them on the Bug Report forums!

Hello everyone!

It is Thursday and that means it is time for your weekly dev diary. Today, we will talk a bit more in-depth about the upcoming additions to the Humanoids species pack.

First, let us take a look at the civics that will be added:




The Masterful Crafters Civic, previously teased in Dev Diary 214, will replace your artisans with a new job type called Artificiers. They will fulfil the same basic production needs as Artisans, Consumer Goods that is, while also producing some extra Trade Value and Engineering Research. As you might expect, since they focus on consumer goods, this civic will not be available for gestalt empires.



To facilitate you focusing your empire more on the industrial branch, this civic will also make industrial districts grant building slots.

Our hope is to allow you a bit more leeway in how you want to play your empire, whether you go hard into artificers to capitalize on their bonus production or use their superior production to cut back on how much you have to build up your consumer goods industry.

And of course, before anyone can ask, let me assure you, yes, it's dwarfs, it's most definitely dwarfs.
For the more materialistic among us, megacorporations will have their own mirror version of this civic.




Now let us talk about our second new civic, Pleasure Seekers. This new civic grants you access to the Decadent Lifestyle Living Standard, which increases happiness and consumer goods upkeep for all affected pops.



In addition, the Entertainer job will now also grant +1% pop growth and Servants jobs will produce an additional 5 Amenities.



Quite a potent mix of happiness and the means of keeping it up. Of course, if you are interested in an experiment or two, you could fill entire worlds with entertainers for the pop growth bonus, one might
even call it a planet-wide shore leave on Risa.

Now with both of these civics covered, it is time to talk about our biggest addition to the Humanoids DLC, the topic of this weeks spoiler tweet and our new origin.
As with the civic above, Pleasure Seekers also has a mirror-version for megacorporations.




What do you do when you outlive your usefulness/your creators? That is the question you can dive into with the Clone Army origin.

As Clone Soldiers, your empire will be perfectly suited for warfare, even though you may not currently have any enemies. Your lifes and continued existence will depend on your Ancient Clone Vat buildings, which support your population.



Did we mention that there is a limit to how many Ancient Clone Vats you can have in your empire at the same time? There is, it is 5.



Now, you could be a good little clone-soldier and simply wage war as you were designed to, or, you could dive into the secrets of your own history, that choice will be left to you for every playthrough.
Oh, you can also combine Clone Army with both Masterful Crafters and Pleasure Seekers.

One more thing worth mentioning, all 3 of those additions are NOT portrait-locked. Some have ethic or competing civic restrictions though.

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And with that I shall leave you be for this week and I hope to see you for the next dev diary.

Greetings and salutations space fans!

Today we’re back with another dev diary, and the topic at hand is the feature improvements coming to the Traditions system. Back in dev diary 214 when we announced the Lem Update and the Custodians Initiative, we also talked about how to make Selectable Traditions.

Selecting your Traditions

We know there’s been mods that have extended the amounts of traditions for some time now, and we also know that it's something that parts of the community have been asking for as well. For us, Traditions have always been an important part of customizing and specializing your Empire during play, and although we of course like giving players more customization options, we also need to maintain a balance. We didn’t simply want to keep adding new traditions without having the UI support it well, and we didn’t also want to give players too many options right away, which can lead to Choice Overload. We felt like it was a good time to review the Traditions system, because we wanted to add a few more Tradition Trees, and open up the avenue for doing more of that in the future, where it makes sense.

Let’s dive into the changes, and keep in mind that nothing is final and there’s missing art. Feedback is still very welcome though.



We are improving the traditions system so that you are no longer locked to the same set of 7 traditions (with some swaps), but you can rather pick which Tradition Tree you want to go into one of these 7 slots.


All the Tradition Trees currently available to the United Nations of Earth.

Some of the Tradition Trees, that were previously swaps of other trees (like Adaptability being a swap of Diplomacy), are now their own trees again. This means that Adaptability, for example, is now available to all non-machine empires. Synchronicity is still mutually exclusive with Harmony (one will appear if you are a gestalt empire, the other if you are a regular one). Versatility is available to all machine empires.

Changes to existing Traditions

Other than allowing you to select your own Traditions trees, we’ve also changed some of the traditions within the existing trees. Let’s take a look at some of those changes:

• Judgment Corps: no longer increases crime prevention, but rather makes your Enforcers produce 1 Unity.
  
• Finisher: no longer provides +1 monthly influence, but rather increases +10% ruler output for regular empires, or +10% admin cap for gestalts

• Open Markets replaced with Diplomatic Networking: Embassy pacts now produce 3 Unity
  
• Secure Shipping replaced with Eminent Diplomats: Diplomatic Acceptance increased by +5, and your Envoys that are Improving Relations have a 1% chance per month to gain a Favor from the target empire.
  
• Insider Trading replaced with Trust or Bust: Trust Cap +50, Trust Growth +33%
  
• Finisher: no longer increases Trust Cap or Trust Growth, but rather increases Diplomatic Weight by +10% and +1 Envoy.

• Mind and Body: now also increases Leader Skill Cap by +1
  
• Kinship: effect on demotion time buffed from -50% to -75%
  
• Bulwark of Harmony moved to Unyielding, replaced with Harmonious Directives: +1 Edict Cap

• Adoption: no longer increases Starbase Cap by +2, but instead increases Naval Cap by +20
  
• The Great Game: old effects removed, now increases damage done to Starbases by +20%

• Finisher: no longer provides Merchant Jobs per Pops on a planet, but rather increases Stability by +5.

New Tradition Trees

We are adding 3 new Tradition Trees to the game: Mercantile, Unyielding and Subterfuge. Unyielding and Subterfuge are currently unlocked by Nemesis, while Mercantile (originally supposed to be unlocked by Megacorp) is available to everyone. The reason being that we wanted to see how it felt to have the Trade Policies unlocked through this tree. It will therefore no longer be possible to convert Trade Value into Energy + Consumer Goods/Unity unless you have the (3) Adaptive Economic Policies tradition.


New art is still coming in.

• Adopt: Starbase Collection Range +1, Trade Protection +5
  
• (1) Trickle Up Economics: Clerks provide an additional +1 Trade Value
  
• (2) Commercial Enterprises: Commercial Zones Building now provides 1 Merchant Job.
  
• (3) Adaptive Economic Policies: Can convert parts of their Trade Value into Unity or Consumer Goods
  
• (4) Marketplace of Better Ideas: increases trade value by +10%
  
• (5) Insider Trading: moved from Diplomacy Traditions, -10% Market Fee
  
• Finisher: increases trade value by +10%

• Adoption: Starbase Cap +2 and Starbase Upgrade Speed +50%
  
• (1) Resistance is Frugal: Stronghold buildings now produce 3 Unity and Defense Army Health is increased by +33%
  
• (2) Never Surrender: reduces Planet Bombardment Damage by -25%, war exhaustion by -25% and increases hostile claim costs by +25%
  
• (3) Bulwark of Harmony: moved from Harmony Traditions, effects are as before
  
• (4) Fortress Doctrine: increases the Hit Points and Damage of Starbases and Defensive Platforms by 33%, and reduces the upkeep cost of starbases by -20%
  
• (5) Defense in Depth: increases Starbase Cap by +2 and reduces Starbase upgrade cost by -50%. In addition, owners of Nemesis will also increase Hostile Operation Difficulty by +4 for the Sabotage Starbase Operation.
  
• Finisher: Max Defensive Platforms +50%

• Adoption: +1 Codebreaking
  
• (1) Information Security: +1 Encryption
  
• (2) Operational Security: +1 Codebreaking, +2 Operation Skill
  
• (3) Non-Disclosure Agreements: Hostile Operation Difficulty is +1, and Hostile Operation Cost and Upkeep is increased by +50%
  
• (4) Double Agents: Whenever a Hostile Operation targeting us fails, we gain 10 Intel on the offending empire
  
• (5) Shadow Recruits: increases Infiltration Speed by +50%
  
• Finisher: Successful Operations refund half of their cost on Infiltration Level

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That is all for this week folks! Let us know which Tradition Trees you like to pick, and why. Any feedback is very welcome.

Next week we’ll be back to talk about the additions we’re making to the Humanoids Species Pack.

Hello everyone!

I hope you have had a great summer thus far, and let’s hope we can enjoy the rest of August as well. The team is starting to return from their vacations and we’re eager to start finishing off the Lem Update so that we can ready it for release in September.

As mentioned in dev diary 214, we’re going to Buff the Backlog by adding some gameplay to existing DLC. Today we’re here to talk about an addition coming in the Lem Update, and more specifically what additions we are making to the Plantoids Species Pack.



We are adding 2 new Civics and 3 new Species Traits to the Plantoids Species Pack. Let’s start by taking a look at the new Traits.

New Traits

We have added 3 new traits that require the species to be either Plantoid or Fungoid.


New traits and their cost.

Phototrophic: Is mutually exclusive with Radiotrophic, and changes some of your food upkeep into energy upkeep. Requires your species to be Plantoid or Fungoid.


Instagram-friendly?

Radiotrophic: Is mutually exclusive with Phototrophic, and changes some of your food upkeep into energy upkeep. It also makes it more beneficial for your Pops to live on Tomb Worlds, as their energy upkeep is removed. Requires your species to be Plantoid or Fungoid.


Contrary to popular belief, this species does not sustain itself by consuming ancient communication equipment.

Budding: This trait allows you to produce some pop assembly. Multiple Species with this trait can help provide pop assembly on potentially another species. For example, two species with the Syncretic Evolution Origin can together assemble one of the two. This trait can probably be especially great for a Hive Mind species.


New Civics

Let’s continue taking a look at the Civics. Both of these new Civics are available to regular empires as well as Hive Minds. Only Idyllic Bloom requires you to be a Plantoid or Fungoid.

Catalytic Processing: This Civic lets you produce Alloys with Food instead of Minerals. Starting Districts have been adjusted to be balanced when using this Civic. Regular Empires and Hive Minds convert 9 Food into 3 Alloys. Machine Empires turn 12 Food into 4 Alloys.

Catalytic Processing is available to many types of empires, but not all of them.

Idyllic Bloom: This Civic lets you transform planets into Gaia Worlds by building Gaia Seeders and upgrading them. The Gaia Seeders have 4 phases, with the 4th and final phase triggering the terraformation of the planet to a Gaia World. Available to regular empires as well as Hive Minds.




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That’s all for this week folks! We’ll be back again next week, so until then, stay safe and be well.

Nemesis: Cold War was a multiplayer event held to celebrate the launch of the Stellaris: Nemesis Expansion on PC.

Watch episodes Wednesdays and Sundays on the Paradox Grand Strategy Channel on YouTube.

Watch it here: https://pdxint.at/coldwaryt

Cast
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Hosts: Fredrik Knudsen, SimasTV Game Master: DJTruthsayer

Players: A_Spec, Templin Institute as the Divine Imperium. Door Monster, Stefan Annon as the Xuman Overmind. MaxTheCatfish, Wintergaming as the Imperial Chocolat Covenant. BurkeBlack, Venalis, CrReaM, CletusBueford, GassyMexican, Classypax as the Antharian Republic of Beautification. SpiffingBrit, Bedgarsan, Bokoen, Alex the Rambler, Rimmy Downunder as The Refuge. D1rtyd3vil, Shurjoka as the Avarian Alliance.

Join the Conversation
---------------
Website: http://stellaris.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/StellarisGame
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StellarisGame
Discord: http://discord.gg/stellarisofficial
Forums: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/stellaris.900/

The galaxy is vast and full of creative new aliens! Join the Stellaris Artists and see how our worlds are populated with a growing array of fascinating creatures, from PDXCON 2021.

Meet the Sapient Combat Computers that we converted into Programmers for the Paradox Empire. Our developers will share their insight on how the technology behind Stellaris is created. (From PDXCON)

Watch it here:

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.