written by grekulf

Hello everyone!

Today we’re back to talk a little bit about the recent news that has no doubt sent ripples throughout the community by now, namely the newly announced Aquatics Species Pack!



The Aquatic Species Pack will include:

• 15 new Aquatic Portraits
  
• 1 aquatic-themed Robotic Portrait
  
• Water themed Ship Set
  
• Here Be Dragons Origin
  
• Ocean Paradise Origin
  
• Anglers Civic
  
• Hydrocentric Ascension Perk
  
• Aquatic Species Trait
  
• Aquatic Advisor, inspired by high seas adventure fiction

Remember to w(f)ishlist it on Steam right now!

For many years now, I have been forced to play Stellaris without dolphinoids... but no more! I can proudly say that we’ve made the perhaps greatest additions to Stellaris yet!

Dolphinoids have finally been added to the game, and the future is looking brighter than ever before. Dolphinoids have been used in narrative examples during design meetings for many years, even prior to the release of Stellaris back in 2016, so I am particularly happy to see them finally becoming a reality. I hope you will enjoy playing them as much as I will!


Tidal Wave of awesomeness.

I’m sure you’re all excited to take a look at the gameplay details, so let’s dive right in!


This new Civic will allow you to harvest the bounty of the ocean, by replacing your Farmer jobs with Anglers and Pearl Divers on your Agricultural Districts.


Under the sea, there’s plenty of shinies to see!


One of our first ideas related to the aquatic theme was to be able to mine ice and bring it back to your Ocean Worlds, to make them larger. The idea originally bounced between being a Civic or an Origin, but we realized it would make much more sense as an Ascension Perk. This is the first time we’re adding an Ascension Perk with a species pack, which in itself is also fun.


If you live underwater, raising the sea level can be quite useful.

As you could see in the trailer, the Deluge Colossus Weapon can be unleashed to create a watery grave for your enemies! Ice Mining stations will increase mining station output in a system, as well as enable the Expand Planetary Sea decision, which will increase the planet size by 1.





We’re adding a new (zero point cost) Aquatic species trait. It doesn’t require you to have an Aquatic portrait, but it will require your species to start on an Ocean World. We hope that this covers those of you who want more freedom of choice for your species portraits, while still keeping the aquatic theme intact. The trait also gains additional bonuses whenever the Hydrocentric Ascension Perk has been selected.


From the deep we come!


The ultimate watery start, Ocean Paradise allows you to start on a chonky size 30 planet filled with a plentiful bounty of resources. When combined with the Aquatics Species Trait, and the Hydrocentric Ascension Perk, the Ocean Paradise origin gives significant advantages to starting with an Aquatic species. You will want to keep your friends close, and your anemones closer.

You will also start in a nebula and with ice asteroids in your home system.


Where there is water, there may be life. Where there is lots of water, there may be lots of life.


Perhaps the most unique Origin yet, Here Be Dragons starts you off in a unique symbiotic relationship with an Ether Drake. Without spoiling too much, the drake will essentially protect you while you keep it happy. The drake is not controlled by you, but can rather be seen as a guardian ally, as long as you keep it happy.




Hostile neighbors? No problem, ol’ Hrozgar will scare them off! This unique ether drake features a unique aquatic-inspired appearance.


----


That is it for this week! I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into the gameplay features. Next week we’ll submerge ourselves even deeper into the Aquatics Species Pack by taking a look at the art behind the aquatic ships and the unique model for the ether drake.


Isn’t she a beauty? Come back next week to learn more about the art in the Aquatic Species Pack.

Embrace the life of a seafaring civilization as you sail the open expanses of the galaxy with Stellaris' most immersive pack yet: the Aquatics Species Pack!

Dive into the Stellaris galaxy with a sea of new choices, and discover new life where you least expect it. Let a wave of new customisation options wash over your empire, with a treasure trove of new species portraits, ship set, origins, and more. Stay tuned for more updates about the Aquatics Species Pack, as more details will soon surface!

Wishlist the Aquatics Species Pack today!

written by grekulf

Hello everyone!

For today’s dev diary we’ll be talking a little bit about a new wave of changes coming in the upcoming 3.2 update.

3.2 will feature some new content and features, some of which didn’t make it into 3.1, and some of which are new. The reason why I mention that is because I also wanted to shed some light on the process itself. With this new way of working, it’s fine if something isn’t done for a certain update, because it can simply spill into the next update. With our ambition of only having 3 months between the updates, it will not be long before the new piece of content will be out in the public. Speaking of which, the new Pompous Purists Civic is just such an example.


This civic was designed to be added to the Humanoids Species Pack with our Buffing the Backlog initiative, but it didn’t quite make it in time to be released in 3.1. In 3.2 you will be able to try out this new addition to the Humanoids Species Pack.

The Pompous Purists Civic is a civic that allows for a diplomatic playstyle, but for xenophobes. The idea is based on an elven fantasy, where they are willing to negotiate with other species, but only as long as it's on their own terms.


Friends? Maybe if you keep a respectable distance.


Back in dev diary 213 we briefly talked about the improvements to a part of the empire creation process – namely the part of the UI where you select your ship appearance. The experiment meant that only about half of you got to experience those improvements, while the rest kept the ship appearance selection as it has looked like since 2016. The reason why we ran this improvement as an experiment is because we wanted to measure how successful doing these kinds of improvements can be.


The Ship Appearance part of the empire creation screen allows you to browse different ship sizes and appearances.

The improved ship browser will be available to everyone with the release of 3.2.

Now I’ll hand over to Victor who will be talking a little bit about some new content for anomalies.


Hello everyone! I am Victor, a Custodian Content Designer that you might have seen around on the weekly streams these past few months.

Back in 2018, we removed anomaly failure from the game. This meant that every single time you encountered the Gigantic Skeleton anomaly category, you would always get the Gigantic Skeleton anomaly, for it was the only one in the category. No longer! As one of my tasks for this patch, I decided to simply go through every single anomaly category and add new anomalies to orphaned categories that I could for the development cycle.



This is not only limited to new anomalies, but I also revisited some old classics adding options to events that previous designers created before a lot of the resources we now use were added to the game.



While this is not anything that will revolutionize the game, it is a great and interesting direction for a Custodian content designer to explore, which we are still establishing on the team. I do hope you enjoy your (slightly) more exciting and varied early game!


Yes, hello, I am still here. My other task for this patch was to create a few varied random events for terraforming. These events vary in power and complexity and mainly break the monotony of pressing a button and getting a better planet. These bonuses vary from getting more districts of a chosen type to perhaps uncovering a dig site left by a species to enamoured with war.



Before you start thinking, you will sit there and terraform a planet back and forth between two different types and fishing for events. Do know that you can only get events the first time you terraform a world, and it’s never guaranteed. Terraforming is quite the unexplored space for Stellaris events, and these were a lot of fun to create.

Finally, Caligula Caesar has managed to restore the AI’s terraforming hunger! Previously the AI needed to gather an absurd amount of energy credits even to consider terraforming, but that has now been rectified. The AI has been spotted changing and creating optimal planets in our internal testing. They also are more likely to pick terraforming techs and appropriate ascension perks in certain circumstances.

----

That is all for this week folks! Next week we’ll be back with some exciting news!

written by Guido

Hello and welcome to a new Dev Diary,

My name is Guido and today I’m here in my role as a Principal Designer on Stellaris to talk about AI in a bit more detail.

You probably have heard about the Custodian Initiative by now which has been created to keep improving the game on a more regular basis and in order to be quicker when reacting to player feedback. A part of this initiative is also to put some more love and attention to the AI of the game going forward - an AI initiative inside the Custodians, basically.

For this, we have set some goals for ourselves going forward:

1. Always work on AI-related topics, regardless of what else is going on
   
2. Move the AI towards being challenging to players in an entertaining way, rather than be optimized to min-max its way to victory
   
3. Move the AI towards being more distinctive, so that not all empires feel strong in the same way
   
4. Support future DLCs from the get-go
   
5. Constantly make small improvements to the AI
   
6. React quicker to player feedback
   
7. Occasionally make a push for more significant improvements

Speaking of which, for the upcoming patch in November, we have some significant updates in store.


First of all, the biggest change you will notice is how we have changed the economic plans script. This script is the core of the economic behavior of our empires. It defines what resources they strive to get when building districts and buildings. How much population growth they should go for and how much research and unity they want.

The functionality of the script hasn’t changed much, but how we are using it has changed.

Previously the script was divided into early-, mid-and late-game. Depending on the phase of the game, empires would prioritize resources differently. For example, focus on research was lower in the early game than in the later stages of the game. However, this approach didn’t take into account the various situations an empire can find itself in. Especially after a war or when a new empire breaks off an existing one. In those cases, even if the game phase was in the late game, for the respective empires it meant that they were in a much more ‘early game’ position.



Instead of having 3 different economic plans, we feature 1 base plan instead. In order to get more flexibility and to react to the empire’s situation, we’re relying much more on the ‘subplans’ inside that base plan.


Subplans can be turned on or off, depending on the situation the empire finds itself in. Our main rationale was to ensure that an empire would be economically stable before it spends resources on ‘bonus’ things like research, population growth, defensive modules on starbases, and unity buildings.
Previously those things were prioritized too early and without enough respect to the basic income of energy and minerals, leading to empires that produced alloys, but had big deficits in energy and mineral production. And this deficit would be the start of an economic death spiral, where the resource debuffs would further reduce production and everything just escalated to the point where an empire was bankrupt on all resources. This became especially problematic after the economic system has been rebalanced to focus resource production more on the districts, rather than the buildings of a planet.

Here’s an example of what the economic situation generally looked for empires in a game that went on for around 80 years:

These are screenshots from Stellaris version 3.0.3

Our updated economic script prioritizes basic income first and takes the new economic rebalance into account. Energy and minerals are most important.

The difference between the ‘income’ and ‘focus’ block is that if the monthly income is below what is defined in the ‘focus’ block - districts and buildings which produce those resources get an extra bonus in weight, when deciding what to build.



Then the first subplan kicks in. If a country uses food (therefore, Machine empires will have this subplan turned off) it will prioritize food production.



The next subplan will check conditions for focusing on consumer goods. Again, checking if the empire actually uses them or not - and then only focus on producing them if the empire has at least a monthly income of minerals of 30.
Based on the fact that in order to create consumer goods you require minerals.



Further down we activate the plans for prioritizing research and all the higher-level resources




So, the script can check for various situations in AI empires - from the fact if they are a Gestalt Empire, using food to monthly income of specific resources.
This gives the AI a lot more flexibility in managing its economy.

As an example, here we have a 100-year old Galaxy with 13 AIs and every empire is able to manage its economy in a decent enough way. Notice the resource tab at the top - almost all empires have positive income in all resources; the ones with a negative income only have a small deficit:



Apart from this, there were some small, but significant code changes that helped the AI in running the show.


The code for the AI has been optimized heavily in the past in order to improve performance a lot. However, this has led to some unforeseen and unintended behaviors which have now been corrected. Some of the districts and buildings weren’t considered at all and city districts were weighted way too high. The AI is also now able to build temples and holo theaters, for example.

Finally, the AI has also been given a bit of support in how it will set up its starbases, especially in conjunction with the hydroponics starbase building, which can play a larger role in how you provide food for your empire. The AIs can now use more varied setups when building their starbases, making use of Curator Think Tanks, Nebula Refineries, and other special buildings where it makes sense.

And all of this was built on the foundation of the last major rework of the economic AI, so kudos to sidestep for making this evolutionary step possible.

With your help, we’re looking forward to giving the AI the attention it deserves and making it even better in the future.

Cheers,

Guido

written by grekulf

Hello everyone!

Today I thought we’d go back and talk a bit about the Custodian Initiative and what the future can hold.

The 3.1 ‘Lem’ Update which we put out about 2 weeks ago contained a lot of good stuff that we'd been working on for some months. We’re really happy with how you have received the Custodian Initiative and the first free update, so it’s really fun to see that things seem to be moving in a clearly positive direction.


With the Custodian Initiative we’re doing a lot of new things at once, and in combination with a lot of internal changes as well, means we’re still learning and adapting. One goal that we haven’t been able to quite deploy a solution for is how to better work together with everyone in the community. We very much appreciate your feedback and we like to have constructive or fun interactions with you, and we want to figure out how to make this process more effective for us. For example, we’ve been thinking about how to have more public-facing bug tracking where you could potentially vote for issues (the voting functionality currently exists in our bug forums, albeit a bit more hidden than would be ideal). None of this has any concrete plans right now, but I thought it was important to mention anyway, so that you can more clearly know that we’re very interested in figuring out how to better make use of community engagement and feedback.

If you have any thoughts, let us know! We are also interested in hearing if you have ideas on how you can organize yourselves in the community to promote ideas, bugs and suggestions for improvements.

Our primary ways of interacting with you are our forums, steam, reddit and discord.


As we’ve mentioned before, we aim to release a new free update about every 3 months. These updates will sometimes be released together with a new DLC. The next update is scheduled for late November.

In the November 3.2 update, our strategy will be to be a bit less ambitious than the Lem Update, and to focus on a bit more safe improvements. Going forwards, we may alternate between safe and more spicy changes for these free updates. Even if we aim to make 3.2 a bit safer, there will still be some interesting changes to look forward to – like pretty significant improvements for the AI. We will talk a bit more about that in detail next week. We will talk more about 3.2 in the coming weeks after that as well.

After 3.2 we will be aiming to release a 3.3 update sometime in February. This update will be a bit more spicy. Among other things, the Unity & Sprawl rework, mentioned earlier in dev diary 215, is likely to be finished and tested by then. Given the spiciness of these changes, we’re also looking into the possibility of an Open Beta for them to help things go as smoothly as possible :) We will be talking more about that in the coming months, mainly after November.

Keep in mind that the Custodian Initiative is still in its infancy and things are prone to change, so try to be patient with what you can expect with future updates. Together we'll be able to make Stellaris even more awesome!

---------

That is all for this week! Next week we will be back to talk about AI improvements for the upcoming 3.2 update.

Hello everyone!

As we work on the next patch with the Custodian team, we thought that there were a couple of issues that have been brought up by you all that we thought needed to be addressed a bit sooner than the next Custodian patch. Nothing has changed since the changelogs were posted in last weeks Dev Diary.

[expand type=details]
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 3.1.2 ###########################
#################################################################

######################
# Performance and Stability
######################

* Fixed a crash where releasing a vassal as a Clone Army could cause an invalid species.

######################
# Bugfixes
######################

* Fixed the Clone Army origin tooltip not having a matching ship upkeep reduction with their admirals. Also changed the bonus to scale in a cleaner way, the upkeep is now 5/10/20% based on the Army's decisions.
* The Genetic Crossroads special project will now abort if a species completes Synthetic Evolution before finishing it.
* Fixed habitability of planets that clone armies have abandoned through lack of clone vats being locked at 0% for them.
* Ancient Clone Vats can now only assemble Clone Soldier pops.
* Going into a food deficit when using the Catalytic Processing civic will now give a -50% production penalty to alloy production. This penalty is in line with the penalty non-catalytic empires suffer from a mineral deficit
* Fixed players being able to move their Science Ship to blow up systems using the “Elder One” event.
* Fixed exploit where AI acceptance from Eminent Diplomats tradition also applied to trade deals.

######################
# Known Issues
######################

* The penalty to alloy production from a food deficit in catalytic empires is not shown in the deficit tooltip.
* Mastercraft Inc. Civic does not change Artisans into Artificers on an Ecumenopolis.
* Some inconsistencies in the number of jobs exchanged by Foundry Station designation for empires with the Catalytic processing civic.
* It’s possible for the Nivlac species to be created without the Radiotrophic trait in certain instances.
* Party Aftermath event can create crossbreed species between caravaneers and an infertile clone pop.
* Shattered Ring World can turn into a planet due to takeover or devastation.
* Mechanical pops with a Decadent Lifestyle have no pop upkeep.
* Awakened Empires don't use traditions properly.
* Machine empires can spawn with the necrophage origin.
[/expand]

We hope you appreciate our continued effort in improving Stellaris, and thank you for your feedback!

written by MrFreake

Hello Stellaris Community!

This week’s Dev Diary comes to you with a little bit less of the future development and more of what we’ve been doing with the Custodian team’s work. That means that we’ll be sharing a little bit of information on the upcoming fixes for the 3.1.2 patch. Next week we should be back to the regular schedule of dev diaries that we know you’re looking forward to; however, this week we want to continue the conversation from last week and provide details on the patch.

First off, we want to thank all of you for submitting your bug reports! Bug reports are extremely useful to us, and we want to thank our Community for dedicating their time to reporting issues in Lem. I just want to share a little context with you all for a moment:

On launch day we peaked at ~18k concurrent players on Steam, supposing each of those players plays one hour, that’s 18 000 hours. Assuming a 40 hour work week, that’s 450 workweeks. This isn’t meant to make excuses, but just to put into context that our community does more playing in the hour after release than we could hope to accomplish in the time between the release of Nemesis and now.

With that being said, we have put together a patch for the 3.1.1 “Lem” Update! The Custodian team has spent the last week fixing issues raised by the community, and we hope to get this patch out to the larger community around the middle of next week (as long as there are no further issues).

[expand type=details]
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 3.1.2 ###########################
#################################################################

######################
# Performance and Stability
######################

* Fixed a crash where releasing a vassal as a Clone Army could cause an invalid species.

######################
# Bugfixes
######################

* Fixed the Clone Army origin tooltip not having a matching ship upkeep reduction with their admirals. Also changed the bonus to scale in a cleaner way, the upkeep is now 5/10/20% based on the Army's decisions.
* The Genetic Crossroads special project will now abort if a species completes Synthetic Evolution before finishing it.
* Fixed habitability of planets that clone armies have abandoned through lack of clone vats being locked at 0% for them.
* Ancient Clone Vats can now only assemble Clone Soldier pops.
* Going into a food deficit when using the Catalytic Processing civic will now give a -50% production penalty to alloy production. This penalty is in line with the penalty non-catalytic empires suffer from a mineral deficit
* Fixed players being able to move their Science Ship to blow up systems using the “Elder One” event.
* Fixed exploit where AI acceptance from Eminent Diplomats tradition also applied to trade deals.

######################
# Known Issues
######################

* The penalty to alloy production from a food deficit in catalytic empires is not shown in the deficit tooltip.
* Mastercraft Inc. Civic does not change Artisans into Artificers on an Ecumenopolis.
* Some inconsistencies in the number of jobs exchanged by Foundry Station designation for empires with the Catalytic processing civic.
* It’s possible for the Nivlac species to be created without the Radiotrophic trait in certain instances.
* Party Aftermath event can create crossbreed species between caravaneers and an infertile clone pop.
* Shattered Ring World can turn into a planet due to takeover or devastation.
* Mechanical pops with a Decadent Lifestyle have no pop upkeep.
* Awakened Empires don't use traditions properly.
* Machine empires can spawn with the necrophage origin.

[/expand]

For those of you still waiting for your mods to update, we also have been maintaining a list of updated mods for 3.1.*, you can check it out here.

Thanks for reading, we’ll see you next week where grekulf will shine some light on the operations of the Custodian team.

The Stellaris Team

Originally Posted here
See only Dev Replies


written by grekulf

Hello everyone!

The first update by the Custodian team is now out, and we hope that you’re enjoying yourselves trying out some of the new changes. We’re very excited to see that so many of you seem very happy with the Custodian Initiative and the Lem Update. As usual, your feedback is very important to us, so we hope that you let us know what you think. Also thanks to those of you who left reviews on Steam recently, it's nice that so many of you seem to be happy.

In terms of 3.1 itself, we are aware of some exploits that have been popping up, and we’ll continue to monitor what you folks in the community can find over the weekend. Next week we’ll be looking at what has popped up, and after that we’ll be making a decision of if and what we may want to hot fix.
We’re still focusing on the release itself and learning from its development. Within the next coming weeks we will start talking a bit more about our future plans, in terms of features and changes, so stay tuned!

We also have some fancy new wallpapers to go with the update:
(you can find 4k versions of these wallpapers, and more Stellaris Wallpapers here)






Last week we held another Q&A session on our Discord. You can view the transcript here.

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The Stellaris Team is proud to announce the free 3.1 “Lem” Update is Now Available!

This is the first release from our new Custodians Development Team at Paradox Development Studio. This team will operate in parallel to the “Expansion Team”, which will focus on creating new content for Stellaris. Read more about the Custodians Initiative here.

This patch is named to honor the 100th Anniversary of the birth of renowned Sci-Fi author Stanisław Lem, bringing with it a host of balance changes, bug fixes, AI improvements, as well as adding content to several previously released paid DLCs.

Release Trailer:



For the “Lem” Update, Traditions have been reworked, in addition to adding a new Tradition Tree to the base game (Mercantile), we have also removed empire limitations on Tradition Trees that were previously in the game, reworked some of the Tradition Trees, and redesigned the user interface for Traditions. We have also added the Unyielding Tradition Tree (requires paid DLC Apocalypse) and the Subterfuge Tradition Tree (requires paid DLC Nemesis).

Now, instead of having a fixed 7 Tradition Trees to unlock, Empires can now choose 7 from up to 11 (with all the DLC) Tradition Trees, adding further customization to players’ empires.


Along with the free Lem Update, The Plantoids Species Pack now comes with two additional Civics and three new Species Traits.

• Catalytic Processing Civic: Changes Metallurgists to Catalytic Technicians, who convert Food into Alloys
  
• Idyllic Bloom Civic: Allows the construction of Gaia Seeder buildings on ideal planets, which after a series of upgrades will terraform the planet into a Gaia world
  
• Budding Species Trait: Pops with this trait will reproduce by budding, adding Organic Pop Assembly to planets they live on
  
• Phototropic: Pops with this trait have 50% of their Food upkeep converted to Energy.
  
• Radiotropic: Pops with this trait have 50% of their Food upkeep converted to Energy, but do not pay the Energy portion of their upkeep on Tomb Worlds.

The Humanoids Species Pack now comes with a new Clone Army Origin, as well as two new Civics.

• Clone Army Origin: Do not reproduce naturally, but instead rely on Ancient Cloning Vats to reproduce. Natural warriors, Leaders and Armies get combat bonuses, but Clone Army Empires are limited by the number of Ancient Cloning Vats buildings they can construct across their empire.
  
• Pleasure Seekers Civic: Gain access to the Decadent Lifestyle Living Standard, giving Increased Happiness in exchange for Increased Consumer Good upkeep. In addition pops working Entertainer jobs add to Pop Growth, and Servants produce 5 extra Amenities
  
• Masterful Crafters Civic: Artisan jobs are replaced by Artificer Jobs, which in addition to Consumer Goods, also produce Trade Value and Engineering research. For Empires with this civic, every three Industrial Districts on a planet also will unlock another building slot.

The Necroids Species Pack has been rebalanced in the Lem Update, with the Reanimated Armies Civic being named to Reanimators, as well as other changes.

• Necrophage Origin: Can now be taken by Hive Mind empires, pops are now also more likely to escape the Necrophage Purge, as well as several other balance changes to bring Necrophage more in-line with the other Origins.
  
• Death Cults Civic: Have had the odds of getting bonuses when sacrificing Mortal Initiates increased based on the percentage of the Empire’s overall population sacrificed, as well as the total number of jobs created by Sacrificial Temple buildings reduced
  
• Reanimators Civic: Start with the ability to build Dread Encampment buildings and they now create Undead Defense Armies. In addition, enemy armies destroyed in battle have a chance of returning as Undead Armies and can reanimate certain Leviathans that have been defeated in battle

The Lem update comes with a wide array of new toys for our Modding Community to play with, you can read more about Modding in Lem here.

For the full list of changes included in the 3.1 “Lem” Update, you can read the patch notes here.

Thank you for playing Stellaris, and always remember: The Galaxy is vast and full of wonders...