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Stellaris Dev Diary #180 - DLC Visibility Experiment

Hello everyone!

We hope you are enjoying your time with 2.7 and the 4 year anniversary of Stellaris! It’s very fun to see how far the game has come, and just as interesting to imagine what the future can hold.

We want to make sure that Stellaris is well-prepared for more content in the future. Something we’ve learned, especially with CK2, is that a long tail of new content can make it very difficult for players to see what kind of DLCs are available for the game. As we recently announced, Stellaris has more than 3 million players, and we want to make sure that players – both new and old – have an easier time finding content that they might like.

In order to improve visibility, starting today and lasting for a couple of weeks, we’re going to be running a couple of experiments that will be looking at DLC visibility within the game. We will be running a controlled experiment that will split up the player base into different groups, where each group will get a slightly different experience (or no change, in the case of the control group). The experiment will only affect the main menu and empire creation/selection, and will not have any effect on the game as you are playing. The purpose of this is to gather some insights into what kind of visibility features are actually helpful.

Before you grab your laser-powered pitchforks and plasma-illuminators, and complain about development focus, rest assured that all of this work has been done by an external team (who has done a great job btw!) and has had no effect on the development of Stellaris as a game :)

I want to emphasize that even though we want to improve the visibility of content for the game, it will never come at the expense of the game experience itself, so you don’t need to worry about that. It is very important for us that our players are able to immerse themselves in the Stellaris universe and to have fun while they play.

And because a dev diary can’t be complete without pictures or teasers, here’s two icons related to some future content. What could it be..?
merciless_teaser.png
 
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Religious or sacred robots, adeptus mechanicus cult. This is what is missing.
That should, under no circumstance, be an Origin.
 
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Grumble grumble... Don't care about your experiments, I'm still not buying any more DLC until you make the mid/late game experience substantially better.
If you're talking about speed, 2.6.x was a huge improvement, I can actually play past 2400 without it going real time.

That was until 2.7.1, that is. 2.7.2 will fix this though. If you're talking about the grind that starts to kick in around then, yeah, that's a different matter.
 
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Did I miss something? I haven't really played a game in 2.7 yet, but I don't see any threads complaining about performance in the forums. What happened? Can you explain please?
Factions happened.
Pops are shuffling between them on a daily basis (literally; the game is updating the numbers every in-game day) and it’s bogging things down something fierce. The system went from being borderline irrelevant and extremely sluggish to hyperactive and erratic.
 
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what's the issue with the performance?
A bug was introduced where the faction membership appears to being calculated daily, causing massive slowdown late game and even noticeable slow down in the early game. On my game in 2412 it was taking about 5-10 seconds per day. reverted back to 2.6.3 and it was back to whizzing along at about 2-3 days a second.

As far as I know, no changes were made to this, so it was either a regression that wasn't noticed or a side effect of another change. Either way, there's no way this shouldn't have been caught before release.
 
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If you're talking about speed, 2.6.x was a huge improvement, I can actually play past 2400 without it going real time.

That was until 2.7.1, that is. 2.7.2 will fix this though. If you're talking about the grind that starts to kick in around then, yeah, that's a different matter.
I'm talking about the grind. The horrific planetary micro management. The broken crises. The fleet manager. The unbalanced research rates. The AI being unable to keep up even on highest difficulties. All of these have been around on some form or another for over a year now and just kill the mid/end game experience for me.
 
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It is confirmed by the devs that this is probably the issue. And you can see the bugfix of the ethic change with your own eyes ingame. Problem is: They change daily.

Not confirmed, any1 came up with his "discovery" that this is related, since then everyone produces kinda fakenews i guess... could be true, could also be false...
 
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I appreciate the teasers, but I hate everything else about this dev diary. Listen, the amount of DLC already puts new players off this game, shoving it in their faces even harder is just going to reinforce their concerns.
 
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I'm talking about the grind. The horrific planetary micro management. The broken crises. The fleet manager. The unbalanced research rates. The AI being unable to keep up even on highest difficulties. All of these have been around on some form or another for over a year now and just kill the mid/end game experience for me.
^THIS!
 
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Before clicking on this, I honestly thought this would be a dev diary talking about a new DLC/Patch that would change how visibility and information availability in the game work.
  • I.E reworking sensor range / our ability to see everything other empires can do with literally no effort (made worse by the border changes post 1.9.1).
  • Its absurd that this has been the case for so long, scouting/information gathering should be a vital part of your strategy [and falls under the Explore in 4x],
    • yet it isnt even a consideration in the mid/late game for stellaris after you're done surveying your local uncharted systems.
      • we dont even have a (heat)map mode to view sensor range! and just have to rely on tooltips for intel levels (Low-high-Full).
 
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View attachment 577156
That would be the new “necromancy” species origin.
Centuries ago your species came to dominate your home planet. But then the catastrophe happened. Within years every member of your species was dead. Your last hope had been a radio message sent to the stars begging anyone who hears you for assistance.
Centuries later a helpful ship of nomads received your message and came to help. Realizing they were far too late to save you, they instead resurrected your race from extinction using biomatter found in naturally frozen regions of your planet and brain scans you had stored away in giant computer banks.
With their help your civilization new stands ready to seek the stars!
That's a cool origin idea. I presume that your race is janky in some way, and that you have communication with the nomads (it could even be the ones from before 2.2)
Before clicking on this, I honestly thought this would be a dev diary talking about a new DLC/Patch that would change how visibility and information availability in the game work.
  • I.E reworking sensor range / our ability to see everything other empires can do with literally no effort (made worse by the border changes post 1.9.1).
  • Its absurd that this has been the case for so long, scouting/information gathering should be a vital part of your strategy [and falls under the Explore in 4x],
    • yet it isnt even a consideration in the mid/late game for stellaris after you're done surveying your local uncharted systems.
      • we dont even have a (heat)map mode to view sensor range! and just have to rely on tooltips for intel levels (Low-high-Full).
That would've been a neat Dev Diary to read honestly.
 
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