Mar 10, 2022

Stellaris Dev Diary #245 - We have a Situation

Stellaris - MrFreake_PDX

written by Caligula

Welcome to this week’s dev diary! Eladrin is busy with something exciting this week, so I’ve been roped into writing about the almost as exciting new Situations system we will be adding in the next patch.

The idea for implementing this system comes from the realisation that Stellaris provides excellent systems to tell stories about things that have happened - e.g. anomalies and archaeology sites - but lacks a good structure through which to tell stories about things which are happening right now. While we have a number of such stories, they are often either not as complex as we’d like them to be (e.g. we’d prefer to have more factors taken into account), or they are disproportionately complicated for us to implement (i.e. time-consuming and bug-prone). Either way, the player experience is often not as we’d like it, since such stories and event chains are likely to be hard to follow, and it may not always be clear that events are connected to each other or why certain things happen.

This was a state of affairs we wanted to improve upon, so we decided to implement a system which aimed to:

Give players an interactive and informative interface by which to experience current affairs event chains.
Provide a structure that is (relatively) easy to add new content to.

Initially, we took some inspiration from Disasters in EU4, but we soon diverged from it, since we realised not all the stories we wanted to tell were disasters, and we wanted a more UX-intensive solution. The result can be shown off in this mockup:

Note that this is a mockup - so not necessarily how the final UI will look.

To unpack this a bit, the flow progresses something like this:

1. The Situation starts. This could happen e.g. through an event. The Situation can either be empire-wide, or it can be focused e.g. on a single planet

Event text is final.

2. Each month, the Situation’s “progress” will tick upwards or downwards, depending on your response to the Situation.

A WIP tooltip showing the monthly change. It'll list all contributing factors.

3. As the Situation progresses, you may reach the next “stage”. Often, an event will be fired as soon as this happens, to develop the story. Effects can also be applied to the empire or planet based on the current stage, e.g. an instability-based Situation may reduce stability by 10 for each stage.

4. There may also be random events along the way that can happen on any monthly tick. To distinguish Situation-based events from regular ones, some tweaks have been made to the event interface:

5. The player can choose how to respond to a Situation via a selection of “Approaches”. On occasion, one might be prompted to change these via events, but otherwise, one can freely pick them in the Situations interface. (We have not yet decided whether there should generally be a cooldown to picking an option). Approaches usually have effects over time, such as “spend X Unity per month to gain faster progress”.

6. When either end of the Situation’s progress bar is reached, the Situation is resolved, usually through an event in which something happens.

Some Situations will progress in a linear manner from left to right, others will start you in the middle and progress either to the left or to the right based on your choices. And we also want them to be differently coloured depending on how threatening the Situation is:

This is also a mockup.

This is all a bit theoretical, so, what changes can players expect in practice? Now I will take you through a few of the things we have done and are doing with the Situations system.

Narrative Situations

Content Design often implements narrative-based event chains set on a certain planet. Now, if we feel like the story has a bit more to give, a planet-based Situation can be crafted instead. The ability to have different outcomes at either end of the progress bar is particularly useful, since it can show which sort of conclusion the player is advancing towards (or at least indicate that there are multiple). To avoid giving spoilers, I won’t say exactly what stories we’ve added in this way, but there will be a few new planet-based narratives to encounter.

The “targeting” function of Situations is not limited to planets (though most of our effort has been towards making it work well there), so we have also managed to try adding a Situation based around a system or starbase.

Owners of the Leviathans DLC - or other DLCs that add Leviathan NPCs to the game - can also expect a few surprises next time they go monster-hunting ;)

Deficit Situations

Situations are not all fun and games. As their origin as EU4 Disasters would suggest, they are a great system through which to portray negative events. They give the player all the information they need to know what is happening, what the results of it will be, how severe the current Situation is, and what they can do about it.

One of our main priorities when it comes to using this aspect of Situations was reworking Deficits. At the moment, Deficits are like a light switch: as soon as you are in deficit (stockpile of 0 and negative income) for a given resource, you get all the defined penalties for being in that deficit (which can be quite harsh). But as soon as you spend a month no longer in deficit, all penalties are removed. This feels a bit off. Also, the penalties are the same for all empires, which has frequently led to headaches where they either disproportionately impacted a certain type of empire or left others (say, one with less need of a certain resource) relatively untouched. Finally, they can also be a cause for “death spirals” (in particular for the AI), as a shortage of one resource leads to penalties, which leads to a shortage of another resource.

With our rework, being in a deficit will start a Situation. You will start at 25% progress in this Situation, and it will increase in severity as long as you are at 0 balance and have a negative income. The rate of increase will depend on how much you are losing compared to your income. Having a stockpile will gradually make the Situation tick downwards; having a positive income will make it do so more rapidly.

This is the actual UI as it looks like right now. We are hard at work finishing it up and making it look presentable!

The penalties you receive for being in a deficit will start off light compared to their present settings, but will increase in severity as the Situation escalates. We are also able to configure them depending on your empire’s attributes, so for instance a Catalytic empire will now correctly get alloy output problems for being in a food deficit.

We aim to give each deficit Situation a choice of approaches, so that you can try to mitigate it from within the interface. So, for instance, a consumer goods shortage might be mitigated by electing to defund scientists, with the result that researchers cost less upkeep but also produce less research.

If however the deficit continues to grow, at 75% progress an event will fire which will warn that your empire is in truly dire financial straits and will need to make cutbacks soon. It will suggest a few, and you can pay a price (e.g. devastating a planet, or removing a special resource deposit) in return for some immediate resources that might help you alleviate the deficit.

Numbers not final

Finally, if the deficit becomes so severe that the progress bar is filled up, the empire is declared bankrupt. This is an unambiguously bad thing to happen to you - current effects (numbers to be finalised) are downgrading all non-capital buildings to their lowest level, disbanding half the fleet and all the armies, and giving 25% higher costs, 25% less ship damage, and 50% less unity and influence for 10 years. But it’s also designed to avoid death spirals: in return for liquidating these assets, you are given enough of the resource you defaulted on to survive for a while. Additionally, all other deficit Situations you are currently experiencing are terminated immediately, without penalty, and you are granted some resources to avoid them returning too soon.

Numbers are subject to change.

Changes are likely to come to this design as we continue to play with the new system and iron out its kinks, but we are hopeful that this new version of deficits will resolve many of the issues with the current deficits system, and make deficits, if not exactly fun to experience, at least a more interesting and less frustrating game mechanic.

Further “Strategic” Situations

We have further plans to overhaul systems or features using Situations. For these (unlike the Situations listed above), we can’t guarantee that they will definitely be in the next patch, but we are looking to adapt the likes of slave revolts, planetary separatism revolts, and the Synthetic Dawn AI Uprising to this new system.

With regards to the AI Uprising: we are broadly happy with the way the chain works now, but there are a few improvements to be made, and we feel that it would be beneficial to the player to be able to experience it through a UI. For instance, it has a bunch of events that an experienced player would recognise as warning signs that they should do something about it, but the inexperienced player would not know what is up and would not stop it from happening. With the Situations system, experienced and inexperienced players alike would know that something is up. However, this also makes it easier to know that you should do something about it, so we are also looking at making it a bit more challenging than just changing species right to end the Situation - after all, the robots are still extremely annoyed at you having deprived them of sentience for all these years! We are also looking at making purging the robots a viable if high-risk approach, at least so long as you don’t have too many robots.

With planetary revolts and slave uprisings, we have a feature that hasn’t seen much love for many a patch even as the game has changed around it, so we hope to improve it in a variety of aspects. At the moment, it would be fair to say that the unrest events are more a nuisance than a threat: revolts feel like they come out of the blue, but don’t have much teeth, as you can usually just conquer back the planet (since one planet alone cannot hope to stand against your empire). Our changes to this system are at a fairly early stage, but our goals include:

Content which may not be in 3.4:
[expand type=details]

Make revolts feel less random - they will no longer happen suddenly, and whether unrest turns into a successful revolt will depend more reliably on factors such as how many pops are on the planet, and just how annoyed they are.
Smooth out issues such as one habitat in a system revolting leading to the loss of all planets in the system. The opinions of other planets in the system should have an impact on the success of the revolt.
Improve the system where planets can sometimes join other empires after the revolt. (At the moment, this can happen in separatist revolts if the original owner still exists and is nearby, and in slave revolts if there is an egalitarian empire nearby). Basically, they should be asked in advance if they wish to support the revolt, at which point it should progress faster, but on the other hand, the other side will know this is happening. Also, we may want to review the conditions for revolts joining other empires, since in some cases a completely annexed empire might have each planet revolt to form its own micronation.
We are toying with the idea of removing the stage where planets have ground combat during rebellions. Troops stationed there can be factored in during the buildup stage instead.
Ideally, a successful rebellion would start a war with the previous owner, but would also be a bit more of a potential threat. We’ll see what we manage to come up with, here.

[/expand]

That’s all for now! Except to add that, since an old version of the cheat sheet for what all Situations can do is actually available to you in 3.3, I’m attaching the new and updated version of this, so that those inclined can make plans for what to do with the system.

And keep an eye out for Eladrin’s dev diary next week. You won’t want to miss it.

Mar 3, 2022

Stellaris Dev Diary #244 - A Time for Change

Stellaris - MrFreake_PDX

written by grekulf

Hello everyone!

Today I’m here to deliver some big news, namely that my tenure as Game Director for Stellaris is ending, and Stephen Muray (aka Eladrin) will be taking over. I will still be staying with Paradox Development Studios, but I will be stepping down so that I can focus on an unannounced project that I am leading.

Stellaris will be in great hands, and Stephen and the team deserve all the credit for 3.3 ‘Libra’. My involvement was no more than setting the initial path towards the Unity rework.

I am extremely proud and happy with what we’ve accomplished, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what Stephen and the team can achieve together. The game is possibly in a better state than it has ever been, and with the Custodian Initiative going strong I feel like now is the best time to step down and let someone else take the reins.

I also want to thank everyone I’ve worked with during these years. It’s been really fun to see this game that we love become more and more awesome by the day.

My History with Stellaris

Stepping down from Stellaris feels strange when I reflect upon it, since I have worked on Stellaris in various capacities since 2013. I began my journey with Stellaris working as the UI designer. I was actually the first UI designer at PDS, and back then I used to work on all the games we were working on. It wasn’t until the release of Stellaris in 2016 that I changed my role into game designer and focused on Stellaris for 100% of my time. I worked as a game designer until December 2018, when I took over as game director from Martin.

Looking back, the game has really made such an incredible journey since 2016. When Stellaris was released, we didn’t really know exactly what the game was supposed to be. We know it was a space 4X game with a lot of focus on exploration, but since it was the first game of its kind, we also had to let it grow up and gain its own identity.

Stellaris is interesting in that way, because it's a game that has undergone a lot of changes over the years, and I’m really proud of all the bold decisions and ambitious changes we have undertaken to make the game better.

The Annals of My Tenure

Ancient Relics was the first DLC that I designed and led, and the focus for that one was to expand some of the exploration content by creating a new system (archaeology) with progressive storylines where you could go back and read what happened. In contrast with the anomalies, archaeological sites are rarely removed and stay on the map even after being completed. In part, this was to help the galaxy feel more alive by having stories be a persistent part of it.

Ancient Relics also featured the Relics system, where I wanted to focus a little more on making a UI that looks really cool with unique icons for the Relics. Overall I really like how it looks when you have relics, and I’d very much like to have had other UIs feel as good as the Relic UI can do in some circumstances.

Lithoids was the first species pack we released during my time. The involvement from the game director on the species packs is relatively small. We write the initial high level design and theme, but most of the work is done by artists and content designers. It was really nice to see lithoids make their way into Stellaris, since pops that eat minerals is something a lot of people have been asking for for a long time. Lithoids was the first time we added gameplay to a species pack, and it really felt like it really put the cherry on top for the theme. Although this was an increase in scope for this type of DLC, I felt like it was the right thing for us to do.

Federations was the first big expansion that I led. As we’ve mentioned before on streams and alike, a strategy we’ve used to collect feedback and ideas into different “boxes”, like “warfare” or “diplomacy”. Diplomacy was the box that we hadn’t touched before, and it was for Federations that we got the chance to really dive deeper into that. We had a lot of ideas related to various diplomatic interactions, but I wanted Federations to focus on the “friendly” or “cooperative” parts of Diplomacy. We did a lot of cutting for Federations, because the initial list of ideas was too large to be feasible. Some of the ideas we cut eventually found their way into Nemesis instead.

The feature that I am probably the most happy about in Federations was the addition of the Origins. Origins feel like such a natural part of the experience now that it's hard to imagine a Stellaris without them. I also really like how the Galactic Community adds an interesting level of diplomatic plays. If anything, I’d love to have seen that be even more cutthroat and machiavellian.

The next species pack we had in the plans was scheduled to release around late October 2020, so we used the theme of Halloween as a source of inspiration for creating the design and theme for Necroids. I really like how thematic the Necroids pack ended up being, and I almost wish we could have done more. Scope control is important for the species packs however, since the species packs are largely cosmetic content with gameplay added as a bonus.

After Federations most of the team started working on Nemesis, which focused a lot on the hostile or insidious parts of Diplomacy. I really liked the overall theme of Nemesis, because it worked on so many levels. The new Intel system we added was really cool, and I really like how other alien empires feel more alien and mysterious now, especially with the new First Contact system & content. With Espionage we had a bunch of ideas, but in the end I think we only had time for about half of the Operations.

For Nemesis I think we had a lot of cool ideas, but I wish we would have had more time to do more with Espionage & Operations. I like how the system works, but we didn’t have quite enough time to give it enough teeth. In the end I really like how Federations and Nemesis came together to reinforce parts of Stellaris that had been lacking, while also emphasizing the clash of ideas and enabling more gray-zone conflicts.

The Aquatics Species Pack was a delightful update, as we finally got the chance to add Dolphinoids to the game. Like I’ve mentioned before, Dolphinoids have been used as funny examples in design meetings for many years, and I’m really happy with how we managed to finally give the swolephins a real existence!

As a game director I was less involved in direct implementation as time went by, and I instead focused more on long-term planning and goals. Sometime during all of this the ideas for the Custodian Initiative started to form. Obviously something like the Custodians isn’t new in the game industry overall (see games-as-a-service or game-development-as-a-service), but for us most of the challenges were organizational. It wasn't until we decided to split Paradox Development Studio into three studios (PDS Green, Red, Gold) that it started becoming a real possibility.

Getting the Custodian Initiative in place is probably one of the things that I am the most proud of.

Why the Custodian Initiative is so important to me

To me, the game industry is changing and it's getting more important to compete with new content. Before the Custodian Initiative, it was a lot harder to balance the base quality needs of the game (AI, performance, QoL etc.) with the need to produce new content, and it could also be many months between each update.

The idea is that the Custodian team is a clear reinvestment into improving the game and the game experience.. My hope was that better base quality for the game will lead to a higher amount of satisfaction and a higher number of monthly active users. My take is that happy players want to buy DLC, and since we also want to make the game we’re passionate about as good as possible, everyone wins. Since the Custodian initiative isn’t a subscription service, the best way to support it is to buy DLC that you feel good about.

My hope is that the Custodian Initiative will move us towards a direction where good game = happy players = revenue.

The Future is Looking Bright

I’ve been working with Stellaris for so many years now, so it's going to be incredibly fun for me to step down and watch from the side as the team makes Stellaris even more awesome for years to come.

Thank you so much for your support all these years,

Daniel Moregård
(Former) Game Director of Stellaris
2018-2022

Feb 23, 2022

Stellaris 3.3 Libra Update is Now Available!

Stellaris - MrFreake_PDX

The Stellaris Team is proud to announce our second free Custodian update, the 3.3 “Libra” Update is Now Available!

The free 3.3 “Libra” update brings with it a plethora of new bug fixes, AI and performance improvements, more uses for the Unity resource, and a new civic for owners of both MegaCorp and the Necroids Species Pack.

AI Improvements

3.3 “Libra” AI is better at managing jobs, dealing with bio-trophies, choosing techs, as well as the ability to specialize planets over time. These changes, along with improved economic plans for the AI, mean that the AI is much better at scaling its economy into the late game, including alloy and consumer good production.

As well, the AI allies will now respect the “Take Point” command, and will always prefer to follow Player fleets while this command is active - even if their empire is actively being attacked.

Our internal testing shows that the 3.3 AI performs much better past year 100 than the 3.2 AI. How does it work for you? Let us know in the comments or on the forums!

Performance Improvements

The 3.3 “Libra” update also includes many optimizations to the game in terms of overall game speed increases. We have seen up to a 50% decrease in the time it takes per year at the start of the game.

These performance improvements were gained by further optimizing pop job weight calculations, as well as changing some settings in the engine which allows more powerful computers to do extra “ticks” per render frame. Additional performance improvements were gained by optimizing the algorithm used when calculating the cost to upgrade fleets.

Like the increased Performance in 3.3 “Libra”? We want to hear from you!

Now Hiring for Permanent Employment

Owners of the MegaCorp and Necroids Species Pack DLCs will get a new civic introduced in the 3.3 “Libra” update: Permanent Employment.

“This Megacorporation has ensured that its employees will never be out of a job. Ever. After the employee’s time is up, they will be repurposed for simpler tasks so they can still provide for their families and pay off their debts.”
-Permanent Employment flavor text

A variation of the Reanimators Civic for the Corporate Authority, Permanent Employment allows the construction of Posthumous Employment Centers, as well as the ability to reanimate Leviathans.

At the Posthumous Employment Center, pops working Reassigner jobs generate organic pop assembly from the carcasses of indebted citizens. The resulting assembled pops have the Zombie trait.

The Zombie trait gives -25% resources from jobs, but reduces Pop Upkeep by 100%. Zombies also cannot produce leaders, have no happiness, are infertile and can only work Worker Strata jobs.

They also forgo their annual review and salary increases. Have a screenshot of Zombie pops in action? Share it with us on Twitter or Facebook!

Unity Rework

All means of increasing Administrative Capacity have been removed, and Empire Sprawl has been renamed to Empire Size. While there are ways to reduce the Empire Size generated by various sources, this will be used to help differentiate gameplay between different empire types. Empires will no longer be able to completely mitigate Empire Size penalties. Penalties and Empire Size generation values have been significantly reduced. As a result of feedback on this system from the Open Beta, Empire Size values under 100 are ignored.

Bureaucrats, Priests, Managers, Synapse Drones, and Coordinators will be the primary sources of Unity for various empire types, and jobs are produced from the empire equivalent of Administration Offices.

Autochthon Memorials (and similar buildings) now increase planetary Unity production and themselves produce Unity based on the number of Ascension Perks the Empire has taken. Being monuments, they no longer require workers.

The Edicts Cap system has been removed. Toggled Edicts will have monthly Unity Upkeep which is modified by Empire Size. Each empire has an Edicts Fund which subsidizes Edict Upkeep, reducing the amount you have to pay each month to maintain them. Things that previously increased Edict Capacity now generally increase the Edicts Fund, but some civics, techs, and ascension perks have received other thematic modifications.

Leaders now cost Unity to hire rather than Energy. They also have a small amount of Unity Upkeep. We understand that this increases the relative costs of choosing to hire several scientists at the start of the game for exploration purposes. The Leader pool for recruitment now refreshes every year, to reduce the need for “leader cycling” when searching for specific leader traits.

Influence Changes

Several systems that used to cost Influence are now paid in Unity.

Planetary Decisions that were formerly paid in Influence. Prices have been adjusted.
Resettlement of pops. Abandoning colonies still costs Influence.
Manipulation of internal Factions. Factions themselves will now produce Unity instead of Influence.

Since Factions are no longer producing Influence, a small amount of Influence is now generated by your fleet, based on Power Projection - a comparison of your fleet size and Empire Size.

Most Megastructures now cost Unity rather than Influence, with the exception of any related to travel (such as Gateways) or that provide living space (such as Habitats and Ring Worlds).

Planetary Ascensions

Tied to unlocking Ascension Perks, Planetary Ascension Tiers are a way of improving your core worlds by expending Unity. In normal empires, they represent the active will of the people supporting your government and giving a little extra to do things the way they’ve always been done. In machine and hive empires, it’s more the well-oiled machinery of the world gaining efficiency or drone instincts becoming better honed with endless practice.

In either case, an Ascended planet does whatever it focuses on better.

Once you’ve unlocked three Ascension Perks (you do not need to actually spend them for this feature), you can Ascend each of your planets to Ascension Tier 1. This increases all of the effects of the planet’s Designation by 25% - whether it be Technician Output from a Generator World or Trade Value on a Commercial Ring World.

Each additional Ascension Perk you unlock increases the maximum Ascension Tier by 1, with an extra 4 tiers unlocked once you unlock all of the Perk slots. This lets you Ascend planets up to ten times, for a maximum bonus of 250% of the base Planetary Designation effects.

Ascending a Planet costs Unity, and this cost is heavily affected by both Empire Size and the total number of Ascension Tiers you have across your entire Empire.

How do you feel about the Unity rework? Let us know in the comments or on the forums!

Thanks for playing Stellaris, and remember the galaxy is vast and full of wonders..

Feb 17, 2022

Stellaris 3.3 "Libra" Update will release February 23rd!

Stellaris - MrFreake_PDX

Hello everyone!

First of all I’d like to thank all of you that participated in the beta and provided feedback on the unity rework that we’ve been working on for quite some time now! Your feedback has been invaluable in making sure that we release this update to Stellaris in the best state it can be. :D

Second of all, we are now ready to reveal the release date for the free 3.3 “Libra” patch. The Libra patch will be released on Wednesday, February 23rd at 10:00 am CET!

And with that announcement out of the way, here are the full patch notes for the 3.3 update:

3.3.1 "Libra" Patch Notes
[expand type=details]

######################### VERSION 3.3.1 ###########################

# Features

# Unity Rework

* Suppressing or Promoting factions no longer costs Influence.
Known Issue: Unity costs for Faction Manipulation are not yet functioning.
* All other technologies that increased unity production now instead increase Edict Fund by 20.
* Autochthon Monument, Corporate Monument, and Simulation Site building lines now generate a small amount of Unity and increase Unity generation from jobs on their planet.
* Autochthon Monuments and other similar buildings now produce Unity based on the number of Ascension Perks the Empire has taken.
* Cutthroat Politics now also reduces Edict Upkeep by 20%.
* Executive Vigor Ascension Perk now grants 100 Edict Fund instead of 2 Edict Capacity.
* Grand Council and Harmonious Directives Traditions now grant 50 Edict Fund instead of 1 Edict Capacity.
* Imperial Cult Civic now grants 100 Edict Fund instead of 2 Edict Capacity.
* Inwards Perfection now grants 50 Edict Fund instead of 1 Edict Capacity.
* Planetary Unification now grants +5% Unity production and a one time Unity award instead of +2 Unity.
* Brand Loyalty civic now grants 25 Edict Fund instead of 1 Encryption. Subsumed Will and OTA Updates now also grant 25 Edict Fund.
* Capital designations now provide production bonuses.
* Feudal Society now also reduces Leader hiring costs by 50%, waives Unity upkeep costs for employed Leaders, causes employed Governors to instead generate Unity equal to their skill level, but removes the ability to dismiss Leaders.
* Finishing tradition trees now unlocks the ability to select previously locked Federation types.
* The Imperial Authority now gains increased Influence from Power Projection.
* Added Planetary Ascension Tiers to enhance Planet Designations through Unity
* Reforming government now costs Unity. The cost is based on Empire Size.
* Renamed Administrator jobs to Politicians. Assigned Bureaucrats, Priests and other related jobs to the new Administrator economic category.
* Resettling pops that previously cost Influence now costs Unity. Abandoning colonies still costs Influence.
* Unity Ambitions and Campaigns now function like Toggled Edicts and last until canceled with upkeep rather than costs.
* From Beta: Increased Spiritualist discounts on edict cost and upkeep to -10%/-20% from -5%/-10%. Cutthroat Politics now grants -20% edict upkeep.
* Hive empires can now build a variant of the Autochthon Monument line called Sensoriums.
* Leaders have a base cost of 100 unity and cost 50 additional unity for every leader owned leader, not counting the ones you start with. The cost goes down whenever a leader dies or is fired.
* Memorialists and Death Cults can now choose whether to build their specialized Unity buildings or regular ones. Memorialist buildings now replace the Autochthon Monument line.
* Merchant Guilds no longer produce bonus unity.
* Rulers now provide +5 Edict fund per level instead of their previous Edict Duration and Unity Boost.
* Technocracy no longer generates unity. Instead the Civic now doubles the chance that your scientists will discover a technology from within their expertise. The civic only requires you to be partially materialist.

# Necroids Species Pack Features

* New Civic: Permanent Employment added.

# New Content

* Added 2 new bespoke star systems and 3 new anomalies to be discovered: “Temporal Prism”, “Lost Soul” and “Ancient Vending Machine”. Also added a colony event chain, “Insidious Ophidians”.
* 2 new archeology sites were added to the base game: “The Mask of Transformation” and “Rage Sage”.
* Added Plantoid, Lithoid, Necroid, and Aquatic pre-sapient pops to discover for owners of the respective Species Packs.

# Balance

* Activating an edict now requires one months upkeep cost worth of stockpiled resources.
* The Hydrocentric Ascension Perk now allows empires to flood habitats, making them suitable for Aquatic species.
* Edicts can now have a cooldown before they can be disabled.
* AI Megacorps should spawn half as often as before now.
* Increased the likelihood of getting endgame crises that are not the Unbidden.
* Beta: Empire Sprawl has no effects under 100 rather than 50.
* Beta: Increased Unity production of Bio-Trophies from 1 to 3.
* Beta: Reduced the costs of higher tier edicts and campaigns.
* Scientists currently researching a technology can now gain new traits as they level up
* Distinguished Admiralty now gain +2 starting level to their Admirals and Generals.
* Fixed unmodifiable traits so that you can now correctly remove special habitability traits, along with various other traits that you were not meant to be able to add but it was fine to remove. Also allowed you to apply existing species templates containing such traits to the rest of the species. (This mainly covers flavour-based traits - there are still some such as Mechanical or Psionic or Necrophage which you will not be able to add or remove via species modification)
* From Beta: Empire Size effects on edicts, campaigns, and ambitions now directly affect the base costs of these, so bonuses like Spiritualist ethic's cost reductions now reduce costs and upkeep by the expected percentages.
* Increased political power of ruler and specialist strata under Decadent Lifestyle.
* Increased the consumer goods upkeep of Decadent Lifestyle.
* Integrated Preservation no longer increases admin cap, instead it gives your empire a flat 30% increase to Automatic Resettlement Chance.
* It now costs 25/50 influence to upgrade a habitat in addition to the alloy cost.
* Leaders now only stay in the active pool for 1 year, hire them quickly before they leave!
* Beta: Megastructures no longer have a unity upkeep
* Pearl Divers now produce one more trade value (3 by default) and will not steal Angler jobs when food is short anymore.
* Reduced campaign costs and ambitions costs significantly, re-added Edict Cost Reduction to spiritualists for Unity Ambitions and Sacrifices.
* Regenerative Hull Tissue, Nanite Repair System and Nanobot Cloud have had their values sliced in half however they now heal on a percentage basis rather than a static one leading to a net buff in most situations..
* Beta: Removed the penalty to trade value from low habitability due to it not working properly with pops that were of a species other than the empire founding species
* Servile pops should no longer retain the trait if they become zombies.
* Spiritualist empires can now acquire the technologies associated with the Autochthon Memorial and similar buildings, as well as their faith based line.
* Spiritualists are no longer allowed to take ‘Byzantine Bureaucracy’ since they don't have Bureaucrats.
* Telepaths now give +5% planetary output and get bonuses from planet administrator modifiers
* The "Sell to Private Collector" minor artifact decision now grants a flat 500 energy and has a 6 month cooldown.
* The Here Be Dragons endgame trigger now lets Machine Intelligences with the Synthetic Age ascension perk reach it after 4 ascension perks rather than 6.
* The Living Metal technology can now be discovered as long as you have some within your borders.
* The Void Dweller finisher from the Expansion tradition tree now also discounts upgrading habitats.
* Trade value is now affected by difficulty bonus. This will make non hive mind empires more competitive on higher difficulty settings compared to hive mind AI empires.

# AI

* AI can now create more specialized planets by switching place of buildings on two different planets with each other.
* AI will no longer instantly buy ever single slave pop on the slave market.
* AI will now prioritize its alloy expenditure in a more sensible way, focusing on ships then starbases modules/upgrades and only building defense platforms as a last resort.
* AI bonus willingness to choose rare tech has been reduced from 400% to 50%, AI would often spend a very long time researching expensive rare tech in the early game if they had the chance.
* AI is now much more likely to pick cheaper research options when all else equals.
* AI will now take into account free jobs and items in the construction queue when setting its economic targets.
* AI empires are now more likely to pick the mind over matter ascension perk when available.
* AI empires are now much more likely to finish their ascension path.
* AI empires that require food will no longer build bioreactors.
* AI empires who are not using food will now delete agricultural districts if they happen to have one, for example when they conquer.
* AI ethics such as militarist, spiritualist and materialist will now have an effect on the AI overall economical strategy where they will have additional focus on alloys, unity or science respectively.
* AI fleets who are following a player fleet with "take point" will now merge with each other when they reach the player fleet.
* AI fleets will now follow the player more closely with a follow command when they are in the same system.
* AI is now much more likely to prioritize surveying a system if they know there is a colonizable planet there resulting in faster expansion.
* AI rogue servitor empires will now build an organic sanctuary on each planet that has upgraded their capital building, and build additional ones on planets with high science or industrial output.
* Overhauled AI weightings for picking techs so that it favors technologies that increase research speed instead of almost always researching weapons (faster research means better weapons in the long run). Also fixed various bugs with this, for example extremely low weightings on researching robotics.
* AI can now balance how many pops it needs that produce amenities better (mostly relevant for Hiveminds, so they don’t put ALL their pops on amenity creating jobs).
* AI will no longer destroy superfluous buildings and districts during a temporary occupation of a planet.
* AI will now demolish superfluous districts, commonly obtained during conquest and purging the previous owners.
* AI will now favor the trade policy which generates consumer goods over the default wealth creation policy.
* AI will now favor researching techs unlocking the weapon type they favor (according to their personality).
* AI will now make sure planets contain at least one free building slot if it has unemployed pops and it is unable to find any possible construction which contributes to the AI's economic plan.
* AI will now only build defense platforms if they have maxed out their fleet cap.
* AI will now only upgrade fleets if there would a substantial benefit (+30% fleet power determined by define SHIP_FLEET_POWER_UPGRADE_THRESHOLD )
* AI will now remember if they have fought against a crisis together with the player and continue following their fleets as long as the threat of the crisis remains.
* AI will now spend more of its alloys on upgrading starbases when they have reached their fleet cap.
* AI will now more reliably build habitats again.
* Ai budget for alloys will now heavily favor building colony ships if we have claimed planets we want to colonize.
* AI now understands how to evaluate energy grids and other buildings that apply modifiers to the planet (so now it can create specialized planets better).
* Allied AI will now help its allies defend against the mid and late game crisis.
* AI is now much more likely to prioritize surveying a system if they know there is a colonizable planet there resulting in faster expansion.
* AI will now look at the individual unemployed pop when considering what job to create for it, solving various issues where jobs were created for pops who could not work them.
* Fixed AI often aborting jump drive orders during windup.
* Fixed Lithoid Tree of Life food building and destruction loop
* Fixed a bug where the AI would sometimes try to replace one lost science ship with an excessively high number thereof.
* Fixed an issue where AI can not build any buildings when negative on food and consumer goods at the same time.
* Fixed an issue where AI would continuously upgrade buildings and create an excessive amount of jobs.
* Fixed an issue where AI would incorrectly multiply the trade value generated by a building by the number of jobs provided by the building twice.
* Fixed an issue where AI would only consider solving amenities issues with buildings if there was no unemployment.
* Fixed an issue where AI would put too many pops working amenities jobs.
* Fixed an issue where hive minds were unable to build the spawning pool.
* Fixed an issue where repeatable tech were getting an extra chance to be research as if they were rare techs.
* Fixed an issue where the AI did not colonize low habitability planets when there are no other options causing doomsday origin empires in particular to often experience a very swift end to their species.
* Fixed an issue where the AI would not budget to use ship boost edicts.
* Fixed an issue with AI budgeting preventing it from using terraforming gasses when it wanted to.
* Fixed several issues where AI would get stuck and not build any modules or upgrade any starbases when there were open module slots which were unable to be filled according to the AI's starbase template.
* Improved "Take Point" Follow behavior for fleets.
* Improved AI construction ship behavior, construction ships will now prioritize tasks that are close to them and avoid going to another system that already has a construction ship in it. Heavily increased priority of building starbases in systems with planets.
* Increased allowed budget for alloys on planet construction which prevented AI from building energy grids.
* Life Seeded AIs now always want the World Shaper ascension perk.
* Lithoid empires are now more liberal in spending minerals on their colony ships.
* Reduces AI willingness to take a lot of planets with very low habitability.
* Removed weighted random from AI construction as it now more correctly prioritizes which buildings to build.
* The AI will now use minor artifact decisions with extra focus put on Arcane Deciphering.
* Total overhaul for scripted AI tech selection. The important techs are now: extra research speed, extra resource production, resource producing buildings, ship types and starbase types.
* Updated AI construction ship logic so that they will keep working around the system they have been sent to instead of going back and forth between the empire borders (which was a very inefficient way of building stations)
* Updated AI tradition selection to align better with the current state of the game.
* Adjusted AI tradition tree and ascension perk selection.
* Nanite repair system will no longer be used by the auto designer when the empire does not have access to nanite income.
* Fixed an issue where AI necroid empires didn't build chamber of elevation on their planets.
* Fixed an issue where clone army origin species would not always build ancient clone vats on their new colonies when possible.
* Fixed an issue where the AI were not allowed to build Gaia Seeders.
* Fixed an issue where the AI would incorrectly evaluate the potential resources gained by constructing a building.
* Fixed an issue where the AI would sometimes revert to obsolete fallback behavior when deciding what to build.

# UI

* Added a textbox for Cost in Edicts UI. Also rearranged neighboring elements to align better.
* Added column for upkeep in Edicts interface (entry as well as sort button)
* Hid Empire Sprawl impact from top of Edicts UI. Put Edict Fund in its place to keep neat alignment.
* Added upkeep into the leaders entry in Leaders View.
* You can now see Unbidden anchor systems on the galactic map.
* Clicking the fleet size icon in the top bar now opens the fleet manager.
* Improved legibility of approximate job output indicators on districts and buildings, and made those on buildings also show country modifiers (those on districts already did).
* Optimized elements for leader upkeep and age to fit localization better and avoid UI overlaps.
* Technologies which let you clear blockers now give a tooltip which says how many such blockers are on your colonies.
* Tooltips should no longer show any percentage values with decimals.

# Stability

* Fixed a bug where the closest_system effect could cause an OOS (it would OOS when hovering over the tooltip of certain events).
* Fixed a crash if script tried to change the species rights of a country (e.g. pirates) without species rights.
* Fixed a crash that would occur if a timed modifier element in the expansion planner was hovered after the modifier expired.
* Fixed an OOS if you ever use every_system_in_cluster in a tooltip (luckily, we never did that)
* Fixed crash when using pass_targeted_resolution in events

# Performance

* Reduced frame rate impact of opening planet view.
* Optimized (slowed down) recalculations of species view and colonization menu so that they don’t tank framerate.
* Refactored bonus resources that civics grant to jobs.
* Refactored unemployment benefits from living standards.
* Refactored Living Standards to use pop modifiers on the living standards script, instead of being checked for each pop category.
* Updated ship shader to support empire color in emissive, decreasing the amount of draw calls for Aquatic ships.
* Greatly improved performance of upgrading fleets. This mainly affects the tooltip of the UI (which was very expensive when hovered over), but also saves some time each time the AI attempts to upgrade its fleets.

# Bugfix

* Beta: Bio-Trophies now cost Unity to resettle instead of Influence.
* Fixed Shared Burdens not providing unity for unemployed pops.
* Fixed an issue where pops would mass switch from one job to another (for example maintenance drones).
* Fixed modifiers for Police State civic.
* Reduced Unity gained from the Trade League trade policy.
* Trade value from jobs now get a penalty from low planet habitability.
* Colony designations that increase unity from Administrator jobs now have weighting for spiritualist, hive and machine empires.
* Fixed order of Galaxy Size options in galaxy setup not being ordered based on the number of stars.
* “Synths Scuttle Starbase" now refers to the starbase orbiting a star, rather than a planet.
* Assorted, minor fixes to grammar and punctuation.
* Added Planetary Automation behavior for districts that grant Bio-Trophy jobs.
* Added missing custom icon for ship component "Nanite Repair System".
* Beta: Rogue Servitors can now upgrade their Simulation Centers.
* Beta: Rogue Servitors now have access to the correct Unity producing buildings.
* Blocked ascension tier upgrade on unowned planets.
* Blocked building ships in occupied shipyards.
* Chronicle Drones now care about photosynthesis.
* Citizen Service Soldiers now produce their unity.
* Colonizing Consecrated planets no longer enables breaking the Consecrated Worlds limit.
* Deluging primitives now removes the observation outpost.
* Democratic manadates now check for uncapped rural districts, allowing democratic candidates on shattered rings to usher in a new age of digging too deep and too greedily!
* Save files can no longer be ‘resumed’ if the required dlcs are not available.
* Edicts are now canceled if an empire can not sustain the upkeep.
* Enhanced the memory of Memorialist Hive Minds (they can now correctly build the special Memorialist buildings)
* Ensured that the Arcology Project checks for agricultural districts on Wet Aquatic worlds.
* Venus realized that they were larger than Earth and has decided to shrink to a more appropriate size.
* Fixed "The Library" dig site occasionally granting unaccessible deposits.
* Fixed Criminal Heritage Galactic Emperors.
* Fixed Curators retelling the wrong info when asking again about the Scavenger's origins.
* Fixed Defense Grid Supercomputer not immediately applying its effect upon construction.
* Fixed Megacorp Death Cults not starting with a Sacrificial Temple".
* Fixed Memorialists seeing that some techs unlocked buildings they could not build.
* Fixed Planetary Unification tech description overflowing the box.
* Fixed Sociocultural History tech showing it unlocked the Bounty Sacrifice twice.
* Fixed a bug where system wide auras sometimes persisted after leaving a system.
* Fixed a bug where you could end up with multiple Zroni homeworld systems.
* Fixed an issue where Medical Workers' habitability bonuses would not affect habitability impacts on pop growth correctly.
* Fixed an issue where a ghost Unbidden Portal would continue spawning ships.
* Fixed an issue where only the fleets of the main attacker would go MIA in enemy territory when a new war starts.
* Fixed an issue where scientists would only get expertise traits based on the fields they were not actively working on.
* Fixed automatic ship design name generation often generating a design with an invalid name (i.e. one your empire was already using somewhere) when using certain name lists.
* Fixed clicking top bar influence icon opening the edicts view.
* Fixed expired timed modifiers being visible in the expansion planner.
* Fixed fleet upgrade button telling you your ships were already upgrading telling you your ships were already upgrading twice.
* Fixed it being possible to build ships in occupied mega shipyards.
* Fixed it being possible to upgrade the ascension tier of planets not owned by the player.
* Fixed leader cost sorting option in the leader view sorting by energy instead of unity.
* Fixed looping checkbox clicked audio in the Apply Species Template view.
* Fixed potential issue where Sentinels (crisis-fighters) used the same global event target as Sentinels (stone soldiers from an arc site).
* Fixed reinforcements not arriving to the target fleet and instead showing up at the station when an evasive path was needed in order to get to the target fleet.
* Fixed reinforcements not using evasive path.
* Fixed several places where tooltips in the contacts or diplomacy views would mistake guaranteeing and being guaranteed, and supporting independence or having one's independence supported.
* Fixed some building requirements
* Fixed some faction demands
* Fixed some inconsistencies with whether Aquatic habitability modifiers were applied and displayed.
* Fixed some megastructures not animating properly.
* Fixed some misgenderings of rulers in German espionage and Galactic Imperium events.
* Fixed some spacing issues in the localisation of the fire event effect in foreign languages.
* Fixed species modification planetary trait list sometimes overflowing.
* Starbase modifiers should now be applied more quickly after changing.
* Fixed starbase modifiers not always being properly updated when removing buildings or components.
* Fixed the Manifesti faction demanding you outfit your ships with the Gestalt equivalent of sapient combat computers.
* Fixed the species gender selector not having the correct impact on certain Vanilla species' leader portraits.
* Fixed the tooltip of Open Border policies sometimes helpfully telling you that your country was default (in a way that isn't translated to other languages)
* Fixed trade UI showing negative values for Collection Range and Protection Range under some circumstances
* Fixed transport ship jump drive cooldown resetting when invading a planet.
* Fixed unlocalised text "UNKOWN_ORDERS" in a certain tooltip in the fleet interface
* Fixed various living standards incorrectly providing unity instead of a happiness penalty for unemployed pops.
* Fixed wrong color of font used in the Alien Box event in Brazilian Portuguese
* Fixing missing line break for the alert about Necrophyte Shortages in Chinese
* From Beta: Chronicle Drone and Death Chronicles now have the same production.
* From Beta: Chronicle Drones are now Administrators
* Great Khan will no longer turn hostile towards their own satrapies
* Increased reward of the "Shattered World" anomaly event from 3 to 5.
* Beta: Life-Seeded Permanent Employment Megacorps will no longer all be zombies.
* Loading... New Rogue Servitor Planetary Automation Algorithms installed. Bio-Trophy district management for habitats and city worlds updated... Have a nice day.
* Machine Intelligence empires with the Rogue Servitor civic won't be forced to burn organics during the Primordial Soup event.
* Masters Writing of War and Politics now also cost unity.
* Nanite repair system will no longer be picked by the ship auto design if you do not have nanite income.
* Pop job weight for enforcers is now adjusted based on if there is crime or not.
* Posthumous Employment Centers can now be seen even if you can't build them yet.
* Religious Arcologies should now provide appropriate jobs for Death Cults.
* Revolts in systems with enclave stations will no longer be granted ownership of the enclave station (it will remain in the hands of the enclave).
* Sacrifices now have a unity cost.
* Science ships no longer get a free survey completion when their target system gets taken over by someone else.
* Streamlined "Unknown Contact" event chain by turning the "Study the Living Sea" planetary decision into a special project.
* Taking "The Flesh is Weak" no longer makes your species lose its gender presets.
* The Caravaneers will no longer turn Gestalt Rulers psionic.
* The Materialist faction is now happy that you’ve discovered the secrets of the precursors even if those precursors are the Baol or the Zroni.
* The Nemma World colony event will now actually fire.
* The Rubricator is no longer lost to the player if a non-default empire kills Shard.
* The orbital station on New Baldarak (which is rendered useless by the events that create New Baldarak) is now correctly removed.
* The portrait selection view for empire creation now gets a scrollbar if the number of portraits exceeds the two visible rows.
* The project for reanimating Hrozgar now uses the correct art.
* Transport Fleets should handle Landing armies better, notably when in ‘Aggressive Stance’.
* Updated various job weights
* Void dwellers no longer start with a broken Posthumous Employment Center.
* You can now build a Fleet Academy if you have queued a Shipyard (you don't need to wait for it to complete)
* You cannot drag and drop ships into someone else's fleet anymore.
* Zombies can no longer colonize planets.
* Added a missing line break in the Take Point button's tooltip.
* Added missing tooltip when hovering the shipyard tab of a mega shipyard owned by another empire.
* Added missing description for "Precognitive Interface" and "Psi Jump Drive" components in the Technology menu.
* Added missing description for "The Sentinels" planetary feature.
* Added missing description for deposit "Project Cornucopia".
* Added missing galaxy settings tooltips to the galaxy creation screen, both in Multiplayer and in single player.
* Added missing header in the description of "Omega Theory" technology.
* Added missing header in tooltip description of "Defense Platform" and "Habitat".
* Added missing information about required DLC for the Corporate Authority.
* Clarified the tooltip for automatic development to be clear when you had it turned on or not.
* Fixed Angler job name not displaying in FR
* Fixed Megastructure view description resetting so that it no longer shows the wrong description when switching between different kinds of Megastructures.
* Fixed Megastructure view description sometimes not reflecting the selected Megastructure.
* Fixed Megastructure view not always using the default image when no structure specific image exists.
* Fixed a Galcom resolution tooltip saying that the empire was already supporting the resolution when in fact it was meant to say it was already opposing it.
* Fixed a bunch of empire names being missing (and therefore English) in Chinese. Mainly Machine Empires and the Galactic Imperium.
* Fixed a bunch of issues in various federation law acceptance tooltips (several had missing or hard to interpret and ugly information).
* Fixed a dev comment being present in an event text when you encounter an empire with Here Be Dragons during First Contact.
* Fixed a missing species name in event The Dragon has Landed.
* Fixed an issue where the tooltip breakdown for the habitability of an uninhabited planet was missing country modifiers.
* Fixed an unlocalised tooltip in non-English versions of the game when hovering over a megastructure's effects.
* Fixed broken localization reference in Doomsday Origin.
* Fixed cases of unlocalised text when the Galactic Community or Empire tried to build too many Titans for its Defense Force.
* Fixed gender selection tooltip in empire creation stating that clicking a non selected gender will revert to default gender settings.
* Fixed grammar of adding a single clue to an arc site or insight to a first contact.
* Fixed incorrect description of traits "Inspired Researcher" and "Inspired Surveyor".
* Fixed it being possible to get unlocalised "Greetings!" in other languages when you opened diplomatic interactions with other empires for the first time.
* Fixed missing loc string for Nemma Mining Operation deposit.
* Fixed missing localization for PLANET_ASCENSION_TIER_EFFECT_DESC in the tooltip for planetary designation.
* Fixed that an empty broken Federation details tooltip would show up if you tried to look at the federation of a country with no federation in the contacts view.
* Fixed the tooltip of Integrated Preservation tradition.
* Removed references to edicts and factions from influence tooltip.
* Shortened string SLAVE_MARKET in French.
* The description for the Imperial Navigation System no longer speaks of the Community of old.

The tooltips giving estimated job upkeep and production are now better at dealing with stuff like rogue servitors (where it would previously estimate based on an organic pop which could not work the job, sometimes giving the tooltip a food upkeep instead of a minerals one).
* Fixed "Tebri" and "Tebiron" (prescripted empire planet and system names) being untranslated in Chinese.

# Modding

Read the modding section here.
[/expand]

Some of the entries are marked as “Beta:”, to show what has been changed compared to the updated beta version that some of you may have been playing on. And also as a way to show the impact that community feedback has had on the game.

Be sure to catch our 3.3 “Libra” Release Stream, on Wednesday, February 23rd, at 9:30 AM CET on http://twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive!

Feb 10, 2022

Stellaris Dev Diary #241 - Unity Open Beta and the Dev Clash

Stellaris - MrFreake_PDX

written by Eladrin

Hi everyone!

We’re two weeks into the Stellaris Dev Clash, which is being played on the Stellaris 3.3 “Libra” Unity Open Beta branch.

Since we initially put it up, there have been over 216,000 games played in the Open Beta, and we’ve gathered fantastic amounts of feedback from the community - some of which was taken into account during the first update to the Open Beta, and more adjustments will be coming before the actual 3.3 release.

The first update included the following changes:

3.3 UPDATED Unity Open Beta Changelog
[expand type=details]
###################
# Feature
###################

Unity Ambitions and Campaigns now function like Toggled Edicts and last until canceled with upkeep rather than costs.
Planetary ascension now also reduces the effects of empire sprawl from that planet

###################
# Balance
###################

Empire Sprawl has no effects (except for edict costs) under 100 rather than 50.
Removed Machine Intelligence increased size penalties, replaced with -15% size from pops and +50% size from colonies.
Megastructures no longer have a unity upkeep.
Increased Unity production of Bio-Trophies from 1 to 3.
Reduced the costs of higher tier edicts and campaigns.
Leaders have a base cost of 100 unity and cost 50 additional unity for every owned leader, this value starts increasing once you own more than 6 leaders.
Reverted Citizen Service, it now provides unity just like it used to.
Distinguished Admiralty now gain +2 starting level to their Admirals and Generals.
Zombies are now less likely to seek jobs that produce resources.
Servile pops should no longer retain the trait if they become zombies.
Spiritualists are no longer allowed to take Byzantine Bureaucracy since they don't have Bureaucrats.
Trade value is now affected by AI difficulty bonus. This will make non hive mind empires more competitive on higher difficulty settings compared to hive mind AI empires.

###################
# AI
###################

AI can now create more specialized planets by switching place of buildings on two different planets with each other
AI is now much more likely to pick cheaper research options when all else equals
AI will now favor the trade policy which generates consumer goods over the default wealth creation policy
Fixed a bug where the AI would sometimes try to replace one lost science ship with an excessively high number thereof.
Fixed an issue where repeatable tech were getting an extra chance to be researched as if they were rare techs
Fixed several issues where AI would get stuck and not build any modules or upgrade any starbases when there were open module slots which were unable to be filled according to the AI's starbase template
Improved AI construction ship behaviour, construction ships will now prioritize tasks that are close to them and avoid going to another system that already has a construction ship in it. Heavily increased priority of building starbases in systems with planets.
Reduces AI willingness to take a lot of planets with very low habitability

###################
# UI
###################

Added a textbox for Cost in Edicts UI. Also rearranged neighboring elements to align better.
Added column for upkeep (entry as well as sort button) in Leader recruitment UI.
Hid Empire Sprawl impact from top of Edicts UI. Put Edict Fund in its place to keep neat alignment.
Improved legibility of approximate job output indicators on districts and buildings, and made those on buildings also show country modifiers
Optimized elements for leader upkeep and age to fit localization better and avoid UI overlaps.
Technologies which let you clear blockers now give a tooltip which says how many such blockers are on your colonies

###################
# Bugfix
###################

Ascension Tiers on planets are set to 0 whenever a planet changes owner
Bio-Trophies now cost Unity to resettle instead of Influence.
Fixed modifiers for Police State civic
"Synths Scuttle Starbase" now refers to the starbase orbiting a star, rather than a planet.
Fixes to grammar and punctuation.
Added a missing line break in the Take Point button's tooltip
Added missing description for "Precognitive Interface" and "Psi Jump Drive" components in the Technology menu
Added missing description for "The Sentinels" planetary feature.
Added missing galaxy settings tooltips to the galaxy creation screen, both in Multiplayer and in single player.
Added missing header in the description of "Omega Theory" technology
Added missing header in tooltip description of "Defense Platform" and "Habitat".
Added missing information about required DLC for the corporate authority
Rogue Servitors now have access to the correct Unity producing buildings.
Clarified the tooltip for automatic development for when you had it turned on or not
Deluging primitives now removes the observation outpost
Fixed "Tebri" and "Tebiron" (prescripted empire planet and system names) being untranslated in Chinese
Fixed Criminal Heritage Galactic Emperors
Fixed Curators retelling the wrong info when asking again about the Scavenger's origins
Fixed Memorialists seeing that some techs unlocked buildings they could not build
Fixed Planetary Unification tech description overflowing the box
Fixed Sociocultural History tech showing it unlocked the Bounty Sacrifice twice
Fixed a Galcom resolution tooltip saying that the empire was already supporting the resolution when in fact it was meant to say it was already opposing it
Fixed a bug where you could end up with multiple Zroni homeworld systems
Fixed a bunch of issues in various federation law acceptance tooltips (several had missing or hard to interpret and ugly information)
Fixed a missing species name in event The Dragon has Landed
Fixed an issue where scientists would only get expertise traits based on the fields they were not actively working on
Fixed an unlocalised tooltip in non-English versions of the game when hovering over a megastructure's effects
Fixed incorrect description of traits "Inspired Researcher" and "Inspired Surveyor"
Fixed leader sorting by cost in the leader view sorting by energy instead of unity
Fixed some spacing issues in the localisation of the fire event effect in foreign languages
Fixed species modification planetary trait list sometimes overflowing
Fixed the tooltip of Integrated Preservation tradition
Fixed the tooltip of Open Border policies sometimes helpfully telling you that your country was default (in a way that isn't translated to other languages)
Fixed various living standards incorrectly providing unity instead of a happiness penalty for unemployed pops.
Fixed wrong color of font used in the Alien Box event in Brazilian Portuguese
Fixing missing line break for the alert about Necrophyte Shortages in Chinese
Life-Seeded Permanent Employment Megacorps will no longer all be zombies.
Posthumous Employment Centers can now be seen even if you can't build them yet.
Revolts in systems with enclave stations will no longer be granted ownership of the enclave station (it will remain in the hands of the enclave)
Sacrifices now have a unity cost.
The Caravaneers will no longer turn Gestalt Rulers psionic.
The Materialist faction is now happy that you discovered the secrets of the precursors even if those precursors are the Baol or the Zroni.
The project for reanimating Hrozgar now uses the correct art.
Void Dwellers no longer start with a broken Posthumous Employment Center.
Zombies can no longer colonize planets.

###################
# Modding
###################

Added error logging for when a window uses a scroll bar but does not have a background
Enabled the use of the "distance" trigger in script maths (e.g. export_trigger_value_to_variable)
Fixed a tooltip crash from firing a nonexistent event
Renamed election cost modifier country_election_influence_cost_mult to country_election_cost_mult to not reference influence, as it now costs unity.
You can now use script values in ships' empire_limit

[/expand]

Some additional changes and fixes that we've made based on the Open Beta and will be in the release to live include:

3.3.1 EVEN MORE UPDATED Unity Open Beta Changelog
[expand type=details]
###################
# Balance
###################

Edicts can now have a cooldown before they can be manually disabled, but are now cancelled if an empire can not sustain the upkeep.
AI Megacorps should spawn half as often as before now.
Leaders now only stay in the active pool for 1 year, hire them quickly before they leave!
Telepaths now give +5% planetary output and get bonuses from planet administrator modifiers
Empire Size effects on edicts, campaigns, and ambitions now directly affect the base costs of these, so bonuses like Spiritualist ethic's cost reductions now reduce costs and upkeep by the full percentages.
Increased Spiritualist discounts on edict cost and upkeep to -10%/-20% from -5%/-10%. Cutthroat Politics now grants -20% edict upkeep.
Reduced campaign costs and ambitions costs significantly, re-added Edict Cost Reduction to spiritualists for Unity Ambitions and Sacrifices
Removed the penalty to trade value from low habitability due to it not working properly with pops that were of a species other than the empire founding species

###################
# AI
###################

AI will no longer instantly buy ever single slave pop on the slave market.
AI empires are now more likely to pick the mind over matter ascension perk when available
AI empires are now much more likely to finish their ascension path
AI will no longer destroy superfluous buildings and districts during a temporary occupation of a planet.
Added AI budgeting for habitats
Fixed Lithoid Tree of Life food building and destruction loop
Fixed an issue where the AI would not budget to use ship boost edicts
Life Seeded AIs now always want the World Shaper ascension perk
Updated AI tradition selection to align better with the current state of the game
adjusted AI tradition and AP selection + bugfix nanite repair system

###################
# UI
###################

Clicking the fleet size icon in the top bar now opens the fleet manager

###################
# Stability
###################

Fixed a crash that would occur if a timed modifier element in the expansion planner was hovered after the modifier expired

###################
# Bugfix
###################

Fixed Shared Burdens not providing unity for unemployed pops
Reduced Unity gained from the Trade League trade policy.
Scientists assigned to research can now gain new traits.
Colony designations that increase unity from Administrator jobs now have weighting for spiritualist, hive and machine empires.
Tidied up the tooltips for various civics
Rogue Servitors can now upgrade their Simulation Centers
Blocked ascension tier upgrade on unowned planets
Chronicle Drones now care about photosynthesis
Citizen Service Soldiers now produce their unity.
Do not resume a save if the required dlcs are not available
Edicts are now cancelled if an empire can not sustain the upkeep. Activating an edict now requires one months upkeep cost worth of stockpiled resources.
Enhanced the memory of Memorialist Hive Minds (they can now correctly build the special Memorialist buildings)
Fixed Defense Grid Supercomputer not immediately applying its effect upon construction
Fixed a bug where system wide auras sometimes persisted after leaving a system
Fixed an issue where a ghost Unbidden Portal would continue spawning ships
Fixed clicking top bar influence icon opening the edicts view
Fixed expired timed modifiers being visible in the expansion planner
Fixed it being possible to get unlocalised "Greetings!" in other languages when you opened diplomatic interactions with other empires for the first time
Fixed it being possible to upgrade the ascension tier of planets not owned by the player
Fixed looping checkbox clicked audio in the Apply Species Template view
Fixed missing localization for PLANET_ASCENSION_TIER_EFFECT_DESC in the tooltip for planetary designation
Fixed order of Galaxy Size options in galaxy setup not being ordered based on the number of stars
Fixed reinforcements not arriving to the target fleet and instead showing up at the station when an evasive path was needed in order to get to the target fleet
Fixed reinforcements not using evasive path
Fixed some building requirements
Fixed some faction demands
Fixed trade UI showing negative values for Collection Range and Protection Range under some circumstances
Fixed unlocalised text "UNKOWN_ORDERS" in a certain tooltip in the fleet interface
From Beta: Chronicle Drone and Death Chronicles now have the same production.
From Beta: Chronicle Drones are now Administrators
Great Khan will no longer turn hostile towards their own satrapies
Masters Writing of War and Politics now also cost unity.
Nanite repair system will no longer be picked by the ship auto design if you do not have nanite income
Removed references to edicts and factions from influence tooltip
Station modifier applying on building/module construction
Taking "The Flesh is Weak" no longer makes your species lose its gender presets
The description for the Imperial Navigation System no longer speaks of the Community of old
The tooltips giving estimated job upkeep and production are now better at dealing with stuff like rogue servitors (where it would previously estimate based on an organic pop which could not work the job, sometimes giving the tooltip a food upkeep instead of a minerals one)
Updated tutorial screens and tooltips according to the Unity system rework.
Updated various job weights
You cannot drag and drop ships in someone else's fleet anymore

###################
# Modding
###################

Added resource_revenue_compare and resource_expenses_compare triggers
Fixed station_modifier and triggered station modifiers on starbase modules or buildings, not immediately applying their effects upon construction
You can now again specify that a leader made with clone_leader is an event leader (or immortal)

[/expand]

Thank you for all of the suggestions, opinions, bug reports, constructive criticism, and observations. While the feedback threads have closed, you can still play on the Open Beta branch. To opt-in to the Steam open beta branch, right-click Stellaris, click Properties, Beta tab, and choose “Stellaris_test” from the drop-down.

Nearly a hundred years have passed and war has broken out across the galaxy as ten teams desperately struggle to keep up with Normal Speed. (Have we mentioned that there have been performance improvements in 3.3?)

The Dev Clash teams were revealed here, and you can view the first two sessions here:

Session 1 - The Act
Session 2 - The Heart

Join us for Session 3 (and beyond) every Monday at 1500 CET (UTC + 1) on http://twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive!

We’ve gathered statements from the Empires:

Having heard that there were a bunch of cyborgs nearby, Heavy Metal, Inc. Party Fleets™ completed a complementary grand tour through the periphery of QA Core space to bring the noise to the local Jira-Goblins. We made a quick pilgrimage over to the black hole they had (because it's cool!), then on the way home ended up doing an impromptu encore tour (with a surprise stop at their homeworld!) when they asked for more.

Pour one out for our little Groupies. They wanted to be free, but the pyrotechnics show near the Dashboard seem to have given the QA Core a taste of the party life, and people say they're planning on a bash so huge it'll blow up the galaxy.

Metal.

Qua|ity Assur@nc£ C0re §t@tus:

> Intr0duct|on of Me7al(tm) to Jirα-G0b|ins
> Prιmary Qu4|ity Assur@nc£ algorithms corRupt£d
> Reboot to firmware engaged
> Restoring from Backup
> Backup not found...
> Attempting repair of primary algorithms
> Repair Completed Failed Successfully
> ®u¦7is_ A§su®anc£ C0re boot sequence engaged
> Crisis Assurance Core θn|in3

We are pleased that you can join us for our latest earnings call. Profits are steadily climbing with the acquisition of new Platypi Doughnuts, and we are making progress on forming the Great Galactic Torus. As you no doubt remember, our projected profits for completing the Great Torus is enough to purchase the three closest galaxies, which would allow us to spread the beauty and bounty of our Doughnuts throughout the universe.

We remind all of our organic friends to remain in their safety cocoon at all times. (If you do not have a safety cocoon, you will be provided with one shortly.)

Thanks to Witch_Streamer for the image

We in the Horticulturist Commonality are very pleased with how things are starting to look in our own garden now, never before have we seen so much immense beauty outside of our home Protea. We are also overjoyed that we have found new fluttering friends that share our passion for gardening! Together with the Rhopalocerans of the Great Cocoon, our gardening projects will reach a much larger scale through the newly established Gardeners of the Galaxy. We hope that we will find the rest of the civilizations in the galaxy to be just as cooperative with letting us tend to their planets. After all, who would wish for anything but perfection and beauty?

However, it has been difficult getting through to our neighbors, the Church of Gainz, as they seem to refuse our envoys' attempts of diplomacy. We will look into other ways to tend to the planets that they have within their borders. We have also heard unpleasant things about the Human Game Developers and the Quality Assurance Core, that we will need to look closer into. Whether you are biological beings or machines, we seek to eventually open everyone's eyes to the beautiful potential of the galaxy.

Blessed are the gains, when one may reap the rewards of physical labour and enjoy the rewards afterwards! Though they (power-)walk a different path from us: we of the Strict Observance of Our Lady Trappistine are grateful to have found new friends in our neighbours, the Church of Gainz. So too do we wish the Doughnut Corporation well — may your quest for the divine torus be a peaceful and nourishing one.

It has been especially pleasing to see our produce so warmly received at the other end of the galaxy: eat, drink and be merry, Human Game Developers! As it is written upon our scripture-ledgers, so shall it be: all who dwell within this galaxy shall be enriched by Our Lady's offerings. We work, that the future of our galaxy may be safely assured through acts of divine merriment and gluttonous joy. [Bing, bing!]

Peaceful nations of the galaxy, you might have seen we've conquered a bunch of systems despite our declared peaceful politics. You see, we are pacifists by our nature, and this is why we started to PANIC when our federation decided to start a war and we made a lot of hurried actions.

Now, when there is a huge not-that-friendly looking federation has formed just next to us we are NOT PANICKING AT ALL and would like to apologize for any hostilities in the past. Also, our beautiful ocean worlds are very machine-friendly and will not cause any corrosion to their metal housings!

Let's make some high-quality friendships now and forever.

The most beautiful aspect of Humanity is what we can accomplish together. With the recent creation of the United Human Game Developers Federation we, The Humans, will together with the ASU and the QA Core strive to create the most perfected Product on the market for all Humans to enjoy. We welcome all Customers to witness as we enter the Galaxy into a new era of prosperity, peace and safety.

All customers that preorders our new product will receive an invitation to enjoy our beta program on our newly repaired Ringworld Segment “Also Also Earth”. Here all Humans can enjoy the perfected experience brought to you by us, The Human Game Developers.

By Humans, For Humans.

The Church of Gainz was suddenly and deliberately attacked by a neighboring nation with which we've been in peace with. Although tensions had been rising, the aggression of our neighbor truly shows the vileness and unhinged hostility that they are capable of. This will be remembered as a day of infamy, one to be recorded in the annals of the Swolephin people, and not soon forgotten.

The Rhopalocerans have discovered their true calling: gardening. As members of the Gardeners of the Galaxy alongside the delightful Horticulturist Commonality, we adhere to a simple motto: all planets will be rendered beautiful. Unfortunately, it seems like some planets will have to be pruned... alongside the mechanical infestation that inhabits them.

---

Will The Groupies be avenged? Are the QA Core going to succeed in "clearing the bug database"? Can the Human Game Developers be stopped? Can the vision of the Great Torus be fulfilled?

So, who are you rooting for? And why is it Heavy Metal, Inc.?

See you next week!