Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary will be focusing on the road ahead after Cherryh and Apocalypse, and our long-term priorities going forward.

Cherryh Post-Release Support
As mention in last week's dev diary, the immediate priority for the team is post-release support for Cherryh and Apocalypse, fixing bugs, addressing balance/feature feedback, and working on quality of life and performance improvements. We are maintaining a running 2.0.2 beta patch which we will continue to update every few days or so until we are happy with the state of the game.

The Post-Apocalypse
Apocalypse and Cherryh were an expansion/patch focused almost exclusively on war, and with it out, we are now going to be moving on to other, non-war related priorities for future updates, expansions and story packs. To give you an idea of what's coming, we're going to revisit the list of long-term goals for Stellaris I made and updated for Dev Diary #50 and Dev Diary #69. This time, we're going to organize the goals into the ones we feel have been delivered on, old goals that were added to the list before 2.0, and new goals that we have set for ourselves after 2.0 (there is no prioritization difference between goals based on when they were added or whether they are considered old or new for this particular list).

As before, the list is NOT in order of priority, and something being considered completed NOT mean we aren't going to continue to improve on it in future updates, just that we consider it to be at a satisfactory level.

As before, THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE OR FINAL LIST, NOTHING NOT ALREADY COMPLETED IS CERTAIN TO HAPPEN AND THERE ARE NO ETAS

Completed Goals

• Ship appearance that differs for each empire, so no two empires' ships look exactly the same.
• More potential for empire customization, ability to build competitive 'tall' empires.
• Global food that can be shared between planets.
• Ability to construct space habitats and ringworlds.
• Factions that are proper interest groups with specific likes and dislikes and the potential to be a benefit to an empire instead of just being rebels.
• Ability to set rights and obligations for particular species in your empire.
• Buildable Dreadnoughts and Titans.
• Deeper mechanics and unique portraits for synthetics.
• Reworking the endgame crises to be more balanced against each other and the size/state of the galaxy.
• Reworks to war to address the 'doomstacks' issue and make the strategic and tactical layers of warfare more interesting and less micro-intensive.
• Superweapons and planet killers.

Old Goals

• A 'galactic community' with interstellar politics and a 'space UN'.
• Deeper Federations that start out as loose alliances and can eventually be turned into single states through diplomatic manuevering.
• More story events and reactive narratives that give a sense of an unfolding story as you play.
• More interesting mechanics for pre-FTL civilizations.
• 'Living systems', making empire systems feel more alive and lived in

New Goals

• Less micromanagement and more focus on interesting choices in regards to planets, the ability to grow planets beyond current fixed size.
• Empire trade mechanics and trade agreements.
• A galactic market where resources and strategic resources can be imported and exported.
• Espionage and sabotage mechanics.
• Improved galaxy/hyperlane generation with better placed systems and dangers.
• More anomalies and unique systems to explore.

That's all for today! Over the next few weeks, dev diaries will continue to focus on post-release support. Feature dev diaries will resume when we have new features to talk about. Finishing off this dev diary is a screenshot of how we're reworking difficulty modes in the next update to the rolling 2.0.2 beta:

 

[Calvax]

And they are not what warp and wormholes have been. Sure, Gateways awesome, but it's not warp/wormholes substitude at all.

They're not meant to be substitutes. I loved warp travel, I almost exclusively played it and what drew me to Stellaris was I'd been playing a lot of the MOO reboot and liked the idea of a game without starlanes. I was disappointing at first with the decision but the game just works so much better that way.

Jump drive, natural wormholes and gateways are all cool technologies that mix things up in the late game. If we went back to a system of having something like the old warp and wormholes in the early-mid game it would break how everything works now.

The only change RE FTL travel I'd like to see is a tweak to how likely gateway technology comes up. In two out of three games in 2.0 now I've not got it until the game was pretty much done and I was in repeating techs territory. Combined with the time it takes to make them and the cost they were more a quaint feature rather than anything that was strategically useful.

 

[Repùblica Vèneta]

I would love to see trade ships added to the game, perhaps vessels which automatically spawn from starbases with trading companies and travel to other stations. It would add another possibly layer of strategic thinking to how we set up our starbases, and would add a lot of thematic flavor to certain play styles. We could create “trade lanes” between us and friendly empties, and protecting them would give our fleets something else to do in peace time.

For example, a bit of the naval mechanics from EU IV could be borrowed, and corvettes could be assigned a “protect trade lane” mission where they automatically patrol the routes which adding a passive bonus to the profits of the trade ships.

 

[Calvax]

Maybe add a special citizenship for hive minds and machine pops that empires in federation with gestalts can use.

Maybe if hive minds are integrated into a unitary state they could form one powerful (depending on their pop size) political faction...

 

[EvilKnievel82]

New Goals

• Empire trade mechanics and trade agreements.
• A galactic market where resources and strategic resources can be imported and exported.
• Improved galaxy/hyperlane generation with better placed systems and dangers.

These points sound the most interesting:
- Will getting access to one or more strategic resources become more "strategic"? For example each living metal allowing you to build/restore one megastructure at the same time? Or will certain strategic resources allow you to build ships with special components? For example "dark matter" allowing to build ships with "dark matter" components?

- Will there be something like trade income similar to EU4?

- Will there be maps with disconnected regions only connected by gateways/wormholes? One could think of a "globular cluster"-map (for the astronomers) with each cluster connected to at least one cluster via a shortcut. Or will there be unstable hyperlanes aka galactic weather?

 

[Serenity84]

Scaling could be interesting. As it is the AI is a competent enough rival in the early game. At least as far as fleet strength is concerned. But if you can keep up with that and establish yourself, you will eventually run away and usually everyone else is inferior or pathetic. This would allow the AI not to be overwhelming early on, but still be somewhat of a threat later on by cheating

 

[Aexrael]

Wishlist
-----------

• Species creation options for species that consume Minerals instead of Food. Think Silicoids from original MOO.
• Similarly options for species that consume Energy instead of Food.
• Option to select Ruler traits during empire creation.
• Events changed from using distance calculations to using min_steps/max_steps, since that feels more appropriate for the hyperlane mechanics, and avoids weird placements of systems like the prescripted planets empires always starts with.

 

[Matrim_Cauthon]

New Goals

• Empire trade mechanics and trade agreements.
• A galactic market where resources and strategic resources can be imported and exported.

I think I said this before Stellaris was even launched, but I'll say it again so maybe the developers notice: I really like the way trade was handled in Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri. Basically each one of your cities had a production bonus to energy when you signed a trade deal, and the bonus was dependent on the size of each city.

A simpler way to handle it would be: two empires sign a free trade deal. One is a 4 planet empire and the other is a 2 planet empire. Each planet that has a foreign correspondent then receives a +5% bonus to production of energy, food and/or minerals. So 2 planet empire gets a 5% bonus in all its planets, but 4 planet empire gets that bonus only on the first two of his planets (order picked by distance from capital, like in the UI), netting a 2.5% bonus (if all its planets were the same). This makes trade deals good for everyone, but better for smaller empires.

This would also make friendly, xenophile, charismatic empires more powerful. If they made free trade agreements with 19 other empires, this could mean +95% production. Maybe we should make free trade get diminishing returns to avoid this kind of exploitation or make a hard cap of +25% or +50% bonus production from this.

 

[Wenla]

Sounds good.

 

[Everstill]

I think there are loads of potential mechanics that could work here, and I think stellaris would be a better game for having a more engaging or varied victory mechanic than the current one. A couple of people have pointed towards a score counter which I think makes sense.

I understand, but how you "win" against a Devouring Swarm or whatever because you got more score?

Like, you are there with a single planet left and the Devouring Swarm devoured the entire galaxy and then *bam* you won because you got X score points?

I like a more pragmatic and immersive way to get you the "win". For example, with these so called score points let you Build a whatever sci-fi thing that destroy all that enemy things. For example in the case of the Devouring Swarm you can get a Psi-Destructor or some shit that you can build after finishing a project that you can start if you have enough "score points" that when completed and build, start to kill a ship, an army and a Drone every single day because you mind control them to suicide until the enemy Empire is destroyed.

The same as a massive hack center to start self-termination of machine empires and an FTL cannon that occupy an Entire planet that you start to Crack every single planet of all enemies in the Galaxy one by one in a regular interval until you win. And of couse a Paralel Universe Banishment superweapon so pacifists can eliminate every single enemy empire in the galaxy without having to murder anyone. (just like the Pacifier Colossus).

I have the same ideia as you, but with a more flavourfull way to "win" the game, using superweapons like Command and Conquer than an instant "you won" message. Functionally it's the same thing, but one is more flashier and immersive.

 

[GeneralJhon]

I want more QoL, considering the aesthetic of the map. I want a more lively galaxy, like ships traveling from system to system or as a planet develops (building slots are used) some satellite are added in the orbit (since the old space station has been replaced for starbase).

 

[Emraldis]

Ah, that's good to hear. It's just that with the removal of some society techs in 2.0 they lost 5% robot production, a 15% resettlement cost decrease and a 15% edict cost decrease. With the Machine World and Mass-Produced nerfs this felt, a tad extreme. It kinda adds up.

On the other hand, considering robots and hiveminds can basically colonise everything right off the bat, and get a system cap boost as part of the ethos, I'm still not convinced hiveminds and robots are really strong even with these techs missing... Getting resources from fast planet spam and expansion still seems to be the most effective, with techs coming in moreso as a later game minor efficiency improvement...

 

[Bdolfos]

I hope next up is a diplomacy expansion with the "space UN", espionage and updated federation and trade mechanics.

 

[Dsingis]

I'm happy to see that planet management is a priority. It's honestly one of my least favorite parts of the game right now. After the early game, there's still so much click, click, click, click going on, even though I know some of the changes in 2.0 helped with all the clicking.

Here's an ironman compatible mod, that should make planet management a whole lot easier, by adding hotkeys to certain functions, you previously had to click on.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1217770254

 

[Emraldis]

I hope that the "space UN" is what federations become, each a mini-space UN of their own, since that is basically what the UN is, and I see no reason why there can't be more than one of these groups split between opposing groups. Essentially, I want to see something that isn't just civ's UN system introduced into stellaris...

 

[Ur-Quan Lord 13]

The maximum is somewhere around Admiral level (it's not the exact same bonuses).

Any chance for a 2nd scaling level, that starts at captain and ends at grand admiral?

 

[Ur-Quan Lord 13]

Wouldn't it be better to have the scaling difficulty not as its own difficulty type but as checkbox on the right hand side (like you did with various other sliders). In that way you could select your starting difficulty (e.g. captain) and then select the checkbox for "scaling" to ensure that it will scale up to admiral over time.

Of course this is just one example on how to implement this idea, my main point is: "why not integrate the scaling difficulty option as an additional checkbox".

Or this. This would be even better.

@Wiz also, do the new difficulties still affect crisis strength, and if so, what level does "scaling" end at for that?

I ask because, while crises seem harder to deal with in general thanks to changes in game pacing and mechanics, 5x insane was trivial with the right setup in 1.9, and removing the hard fleet cap will make it easier in 2.0.2. I'd rather the maximum crisis difficulty be literally impossible, rather than too easy, but I've seen 2.0's "5x hard" crisis fleets and am confident they could be handled even with the hard fleet cap.

 

[mysticdueler]

Would personally prefer a federation to be like its own UN, where each state within votes on issues, however you could be associated with other federations at the same time. This may or may not lead you to have to potential switch allegiances if the two Feds begin to rub up against each other, or you could play member states off of each other for personal gain.

So much yes. I’d agree more than once if I could!

 

[Netist]

Less micromanagement

There's already barely any micromanagement in the game the way it is. Please stop reducing complexity in an effort to "reduce micromanagement". It doesn't improve the experience.

 

[Cat_Fuzz]

There's already barely any micromanagement in the game the way it is. Please stop reducing complexity in an effort to "reduce micromanagement". It doesn't improve the experience.

@Wiz I have to second the above and I'm surprised given what you had previously said about micro and people's perception of it being everywhere.

 

[Thumos]

I understand, but how you "win" against a Devouring Swarm or whatever because you got more score?

[...]

I have the same ideia as you, but with a more flavourfull way to "win" the game, using superweapons like Command and Conquer than an instant "you won" message. Functionally it's the same thing, but one is more flashier and immersive.

I think you're according too much importance to the "winning" term and taking it too literally. It's not so much about "winning" than giving players who care some sense of completion by creating a gaming context where each run can have a beginning, a development and an end, at which point they can assess their success compared to other players or arbitrary references (ala CK) - even if you end up being completely destroyed.

I'm not saying that's how stellaris should be played or win conditions should be implemented in it, but that's imho what ppl are talking about when they ask for a scoring system similar to what EU and others offer.