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Stellaris: Console Edition Development Diary #34 - Necroids Ships and Portraits

Hello Stellaris: Console Edition Community!

Welcome to another Console Edition Development Diary. If you haven’t heard the news, the Necroids Species Pack will be released on November 11th!


The Necroids Species Pack for Stellaris: Console Edition includes:
  • 1 New Origin - Necrophage
  • 3 New Civics - Death Cults, Reanimated Armies, Memorialist
  • 16 New Portraits (15 organic, 1 robotic)
  • New Shipset
  • New Advisor Voice
  • New City Set and Diplomacy Room
  • New Namelists
  • New Buildings

Necroids Portraits

Some of you have likely been drooling over these portraits for a while, and we’re glad to finally be able to bring them to you! The Necroids portraits were inspired by everything from Venetian masks, Egyptian mummies, Mexican makeup from Día de Muertos, wraiths, ascended energy beings, vampires, dark elves, and of course skulls.

Here’s some early concept art from the development process:

1.png

Necroids Portraits Concept Art
2.png

Necroids Portraits Concept Art​


And the final product, without the purple overlay:

portraits.gif


Necroids Shipset

The Necroids shipset is one of the prettiest that Stellaris has released to date (in our, obviously unbiased opinion).

Quoting Fredrik Toll, Art Director for Stellaris, on designing the new Necroids ship set:
After settling on the theme, the first thing we do when embarking on designing a new ship-set for a species pack, is going through the core ideas of the species pack with our internal team of concept artists. In this case it was centered around the theme of death, and the various species who have cheated it. After the brief, we had everyone write down their association and ideas for this theme to know what everyone is thinking. This allows us to align more what it’s all about, share ideas, and inspire each other. By doing that we are able to highlight what is more important and what does not fit with the theme.

After this we do a search for visual reference to use in the concept process. These can be anything from patterns, statues, tiny objects, to buildings, whatever inspires us visually in connection to the theme. We look mostly for shapes, but also materials. Architecture is usually a great source of inspiration, they have great shapes, and a scale suitable for ship details. We try to avoid using other existing ships as reference since we want to develop something original, not just a variant of others, though they can still be a reference, if only to show what we don't want.

For Necroids we looked a lot at Art Deco and brutalist architecture, tombs, pyramids, as well as skulls, fossils and many other things. After reviewing and discussing the references we start sketching, going wide, anything goes. Sometimes they align a lot with our references, other times ideas come from nowhere, it’s all part of the process. This leads to a whole lot of Ship designs ideas. Here are a handful of those.
Click to expand...

3.png

Concept art of the Necroids Science Ship

4.png

Concept Art of the Construction and Transport ships​

The Art department has really knocked the Necroids shipset out of the ballpark here, and we’re excited to get our Console Edition community playing with this new content! And finally the end results:

5.png

Necroids Corvette
6.png

Necroids Destroyer
7.png

Necroids Cruiser
8.png

Necroids Battleship
9.png

Necroids Titan
10.png

Necroids Juggernaut​

The Chamber of Elevation

We know many of you play Stellaris for roleplay reasons, and we love that. As some of you may know, we host weekly Stellaris: Console Edition streams every Monday at 1700 CET. To celebrate the release of the Necroids Species Pack, we invite all of you to join us on Discord, and take part in our roleplayed Senate. Once there, you will be able to join a party, and propose and pass laws that we will have to follow on the next weekly stream (within reason).

This is going to be a great deal of fun, and we hope you all join us on Discord!

chamber of elevation.png

And be sure to join us next week, where we will be discussing the new Origin and Civics included in the Necroids Species Pack! Necroids will be available as the final addition to Expansion Pass Four, on November 11th! You can get Expansion Pass Four here.

colossus firing.gif

Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational Necroids Colossus!​
 
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Will the necrophage purge type come with this?
 
Shadowwraith666 said:
why do most of the playable ship designs have the same "all hardpoints in 1 line" approach?
Click to expand...

imma hazard a completely uninformed guess:

it might be less complicated to design new ships around fixed hard points. less to go wrong whilst also not limiting what you can do with the design.

so like, maybe if you had a cruiser with hard points on some wing-type thing for one species, but another species didn’t have those wing designs, it could potentially mess up balance or require altering coding between the same ship type?

every ship, regardless of species, ship type or aesthetic is likely going to have a chassis or hull, so a designer can go to town on the rest of the ship’s aesthetic (though i assume they have to keep the hit boxes the same?) without having to be too concerned about making sure the weapon set-ups don’t give an unfair advantage to one ship type or species, or that programmers have to mess with coding or whatever and have to crush more potential bugs than is necessary. it might even save on memory space or ram or whatever to some degree?

i dunno. i’m not a game designer or a programmer, so i’m very likely talking out of my beautifully sculpted rectum. maybe a dev can enlighten us.
 
Shadowwraith666 said:
they could use some of the non-playable ship styles such the style used by the Nomads or pirate/marauder styles
Click to expand...
We actually get the Maurauder ships in the Nemesis expansion, they're not just skins though, they're actual unlockable ships that are better than the normal ships, but as far as I'm aware they don't have Battleships. Personally I hate the Maurauder skin though, it just looks so bland, basic and boring
 
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