Stellaris Dev Diary #174 - Federations is out, now what?

[Ezumiyr]

Every motion has passed so far in my game, overwhelmingly.

In your game maybe, but I've seen different things.
However it's true that the AI seems to default on "yes" even if it doesn't seem to benefit to them. Maybe the AI is just good at using favours, though? There's generally a lot of back and forth between support and opposition.

 

[Red Death]

Looking forward to the bugfixes!

As for the May update: I have to second the request for a tree of Unity/Spiritualist Resolutions.

Also, please take another look at Empire Sprawl, it's not doing its job right now.

 

[MilkInBags]

Would it be a good idea to add penalties or breach for political stance and rivalries? In the endgame there should be some laws to make the whole galaxy pacifist, without having to denounce.

 

[Calvax]

Also, we currently have an Egalitarian focused Law-path. Why not add some laws that would be favorable for Authoritarians?

It would be great if Hegemon had laws that assigned political power to the leader, centralising power that could be used in the GC

 

[Ambereyed]

@grekulf thanks for your team hard work, after 2.6 Stellaris is back on track again.

I have to ask do you consider fleshing out some early game flavour messages about meeting allen life? They don't work for marauders, caraveners and "event" aliens like lost alien scientist, Parayidaya or probe scavengers. I know it's only very minor, flavour thing, but it's not updated since game release.

Also, do you consider adding robot ship models? Since Synthetic dawn we get lithoid models, caraveneers, and collosi/titan/juggernaut for everyone else. It bugs me out why robots still don't have their own models.

Could we also get ability to properly investigate caraveneers after first meeting? Sometimes their fleets appear, but introduction event doesn't fire. Last game I even get two caraveneer related quests (+1000 energy and old ship) before they were properly introduced.

Everything above are just small, mostly flavour things, that imho fit into scope of next patch.

 

[Jman5]

In many legislative bodies, votes that are unanimous are essentially fast-tracked into passing. It would be nice if we could pass all those early votes that 90-100% of the galactic community are on board with. The drip feed of voting on uncontroversial things makes it a little slow. I would like to get to more of the interesting and contentious votes faster.

 

[Radene]

Maybe more information on why empires are voting a certain way on resolutions, their +/- modifiers or "reasons" more openly displayed, and perhaps being able to influence them prior to vote, while Senate is in recess.

 

[grekulf]

Will the multiplayer desync problem be addressed in the 2.6.3 patch?

2.6.3 countains multiple OOS fixes.

 

[Sinfeather]

Will the multiplayer desync problem be fixed??? i mean ,game being playable is more important than other things

 

[AnssiA]

The senate needs to work much faster. Some of the resolutions that have enough support have stayed in the queue for last 40 years. The senate should quickly pass everything that has support and not pass stuff that doesn't.

 

[varradami]

As I noted in another thread, my experience was that the AI still can't manage to fight wars. I've been playing Stellaris since release, and have avoided using federations for years because the incompetent AI would just make life more difficult. I was hoping that would change with the release of a DLC called "Federations", but apparently not - I was forced into a war I wanted no part of by two AI empires who can't manage to actually do anything.

Frankly, I feel like a chump for buying Federations.

Is fixing the AI so it can actually fight a war (or not fight ones it can't win) in your plans for 2.6.3?

 

[Red Death]

That is an improvement that is already planned for the update

We will make it more clear how the votes went, and allow you to use favors

Does that include more detailed reasoning than: -50 base, +100 supports federation development?

 

[Karpaj]

Recently I realised that we can disable sight of hyperlanes.

https://i.imgur.com/1nXsEV2.jpg

The universe looks strange then, but then I found that we are missing VERY important feature - wormhole mapmode - which could looks something like this

https://i.imgur.com/lgh6qNq.jpg

With better visibility (after exploring these wormholes), it may be way easier to play the game - now we have to check everytime where exacly is this wormhole going manually which takes time and doesn't encourages people to use them. I can easly see people playing game with 0.5 hyperlanes but x5 wormholes if this could be implemented.

 

[RabbaDooDabba]

@grekulf I think the resolution "Profit Maximisation Engines" should have some political power redistributions (+PP for rulers and diminishing the PP for specialists and workers)
or maybe a resolution line that runs counter to The Greater Good and puts the upper strata in more and more power.

Also using favours to diplomaticaly ask for independence as a subject would be nice, currently the base sits at -50 and adding 10 favours ups this to 0 and I have found no other way to get a +1 from anywhere else.

 

[Fyren85]

- the planet automation ai upgrades buildings when there is no positive income of strategic ressources. And when they get upgraded the ai should build a refinery on the specialized planet.
- Can you make cruisers more interesting? Maybe give them a specific role or exclusive support modules.
- I played ca. 80h since federation release and the ai is voting on sanctions the whole time. Can you check this?
- Late game planet management is a pain. It needs some better Planet automation.
- The pop moving window needs an overhaul. (it's highly requested)
- a new crisis would be cool
- a origin where you start as a Trade or Science Federation is missing.
- i really miss a shipset for machines

 

[Voy]

I would love some dimension to the vassal-overlord relationship and the galaxy.

 

[draqsko]

That is an improvement that is already planned for the update

We will make it more clear how the votes went, and allow you to use favors

Would it also be possible to show the DoW results as well? It's sort of annoying to have to go through opinion modifiers for something I should easily know as who voted for and against a DoW. Maybe some sort of popup window with a confirmation button to clear it, sort of like internal elections.

 

[karl2025]

Things I'd like to see:
Origins for the other federation types. We have regular federation and Hegemon, but I'd like to start in a trade league or research federation or martial alliance.
The ability to make vassals vote with you in federations or the Galactic Community.

 

[Delpheus]

Hello everyone!

Federations was released a little bit over a week ago, and we hope it's still giving you much joy.

There’s much to celebrate as the community has broken a bunch of records! We had 64-thousand people playing Stellaris on Saturday, which is the highest amount of concurrent players since its release 4 years ago. We want to thank you for the massive amount of support we’ve received with this expansion! We hope everyone has found this expansion as fun and enjoyable as us.

While you are busy enjoying the game we’ve been planning updates and working on patches. We are currently working on a 2.6.3 that we’re planning on releasing as a beta sometime soon. 2.6.3 should hopefully be the last of the smaller patches, as we will be switching focus to a somewhat larger free update in May.

The May update (TBA) will contain more bug fixes, but also a bunch of new things for you to play with. We are very interested in hearing your feedback and ideas regarding Federations, and if there was anything you would have wished for us to add. We are especially interested in feedback related to Resolutions and Federation Laws. Although I will not promise they will be added, I still wanted to leave some room open in case there were ideas that the community really wanted.

View attachment 559188
Will you protect the Tiyanki or hunt them for profit?
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We will give you some more information about the May update at a later stage, so stay tuned! Until then, keep enjoying the game

Please add an option for team starting positions!
My group of friends likes to play with predetermined teams, like 2v2, but Stellaris does not allow for this and there is no mod for this either.

We need something like clustered players, but "cluster one" and "cluster two" and "cluster three" that can be decided before spawning.

Right now there is no way to have a proper Team game with the spawns being so completely random.

You said to share ideas so there it is, hopefully this problem is recognized. That's the thing my group really wants right now. A lot of people can't find the motivation to play and get burnt out quickly because they spawn next to the enemy players and their allies are too far away on the other side of the Galaxy and cannot help them.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

Thanks for the update.

To me it feels like Gestalts were a little left out in terms of diplomacy in this update. I get that this was your decision, you already said that Gestalts are not supposed to be as good as non-Gestalts at diplomacy. Ingame, this is mostly due to having less Envoys and less sources to increase diplomatic weight.

However, I would be happy about a couple more resolutions. For example once that favour a slavery/ autocratic playstyle. Something like starting pops or Hiveminded pops may only have living standards such as "Drone" and "Full Citizenship". All non-starting pops or non-Hivemind pops must have lower living standards like residence. And later on escalate this by further resolutions to something like "All non-starting pops or non-Hivemind pops must be enslaved or assimilated".

I welcome the changes to Machine empires and Hiveminds a lot. They feel a lot more unique now, which is great. Something I still don't like is how Gestalts are missing out on a lot of content from events. For example the loved Horizon Signal. This event is even possible for Synth Ascended empires, so I do not see why it should be locked for Hiveminds and even Machine empires.

This event is cosmic horror, the text isn't even supposed to fit or make any sense. Its perfectly fine it if makes no sense to send love poems to a Gestalt consciousness. All you would have to do is change some stuff like pop ethics attraction and this event is possible for Gestalts.

Same with the "Species self adaption event". This is possible only for non-Gestalts. Why is this the case? Because of this, organic non-Gestalt pops are way more adaptable to low habitability environments than Hivemind pops, which are supposed to be best at adapting! And not only that, non-Hivemined organic pops even get traits such as Strong and Rapid breeders for free, while Hivemind pops cannot do this.

And events like "Impossible Organism" which adds the Nivlac species is locked for Hiveminds. Why is this the case? It works perfectly fine with Driven Assimilators or Rogue Servitors. Seems like an oversight to not make this event available for Hiveminds.

Overall playing Gestalt is a lot more fun in this patch. I am having the most fun I have ever had since I started playing the game shortly before 2.2. But even to this day, playing Gestalt has a lot to do with just having a lot less variety and events. I don't even know if there are any Gestalt-only, Hivemind-only or Machine Empire-only events. I get that its probably too much work to design events like these. So why not take our advice and wishes and implement these missing events for Gestalts aswell? Its a ton of nice content which shouldn't be too much effort to make available.

As for what we want in the future: The Origin System is in my opinion the best addition from this expansion. Going forward, I would like more of these, but especially more civics that change playstyles.

Give us civics that change how you can play the game! Civics like Barbaric Despoilers, Criminal Syndicate, Driven Assimilator, Rogue Servitor etc. Especially Hivemind could need 1-2 additional civics that are as cool as the Machine empire civics.

When playing Hivemind I am always a little dissapointed that I cannot make the perfect organism. This is mainly due to not having access to events like the Horizon Signal, or species adapatation. Or even Xeno-Compatibility! How about making Bio-Ascension for Hiveminds more unique and powerful than for regular organics, or atleast give them the same amount of options.

How about a special civic that adds a trait like "Gene collector" which boosts ressource output, habitability etc but you have to consume pops from different kinds of species. So for example you start with cold planet preference, if you manage to consume enough pops with other planet preference, you gain that planet preference ontop of yours. And you gain additional bonus ressource output. A lot of Bio-Ascension is about having multiple species for every kind of job. So how about reverting this entirely for Hiveminds and create ony single-super organism that must consume all others to gain their traits and powers? This could be done in a variety of ways. With Ascension perks or civics.

You see where I am going with this? In my opinion, changes like this create tons of options, variety and make the game a lot more fun. You can see it from mods like Complex's unnofficial Hivemind expansion, which adds civics for Hiveminds, which enable you to purge pops and grow your own pops out of their bodies, like the Xenomorphs in Alien. Players love content like this!