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Stellaris Dev Diary #187 - Post-mortem

Zaztl’s time had come. The Ritual of Elevation was soon to begin, and as she was inching ever closer to her own final destiny, she wondered “Is this perhaps the start of a new life?”. She couldn’t help but to latch on to hope in her moment of dread, but she also knew the futility of the question.

No Jeferian would ever know the answer to that question.

Shumon ins-Beth was born, the newest individual to join the Pasharti species.


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The result of dark experimentation by the Jeferians - the former owners of the planet Taralon - the Pashartians are the ultimate parasites. Originally a semi-sapient creature dwelling in the depths of Taralon's mountains, the Jeferians uplifted and augmented them to act as a subservient slave race. However, their uplifting was rather too effective, and they unleashed a monster. Horrified at the capabilities of their creation - which included the ability to absorb other sentient species and turn them into Pashartians - the Jeferians tried to shut down the experiment. However, a small group of uplifted Pashartians escaped.

Over the years, they bided their time, managing not only to evade capture, but also gradually increase their numbers and develop a technological base to rival the Jeferians. Eventually, the Jeferians noticed that something was amiss, but by then they were powerless to resist.

Soon the Pashartians had seized control of the planet, unleashing violent pogroms on their erstwhile oppressors - all the while further increasing their numbers. Now poised to take to the stars, the Pashartians stand ready to pursue what they see as their solemn duty - the conversion of all lesser life forms to their likeness.


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Hello everyone!

Two weeks ago we announced the Necroids Species Pack, and today we’ll be giving you more information about the gameplay aspects. But first, I’ll take the opportunity to link the trailer once again, in case you missed it.


For Necroids we wanted to add some new gameplay that would be available to many more different types of empires and species. Unlike Lithoids, these Civics and Origins will not require you to use a Necroid portrait. For Lithoids we felt like it made sense, but in this case we didn’t want to impose any limitations on your imagination and creativity.

Necroids gameplay includes:
  • Necrophage (Origin)
  • Memorialist (Civic)
  • Death Cult (Civic)
  • Reanimated Armies (Civic)

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Necrophage is a new Origin that means that your primary species has a very hard time to procreate by themselves, but is instead dependent on transforming other Pops into themselves.

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Necrophage Trait - live long and consume

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Chamber of Elevation - when regular Uplifting isn’t enough

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Necrophytes - Hey, what does the necro part of my job title stand for anyway?

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In addition, there is also the Reanimated Armies civic that we showed in DD #185. This civic replaces the Military Academy with a Dread Encampment, and can recruit Undead Armies that are unaffected by morale.

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Reanimated Armies - the ultimate in recycling.

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Dread Encampment Building - wouldn’t want to get caught dead here

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Undead Army - it’s not wight how they work them to the bone, but they don’t complain

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Necromancer job - some say it’s a dead end job, but they’ve made a grave mistake
(Note: Above image includes the bonus from Ground Defense Planning)

This civic has a few restrictions - no pacifists, and it conflicts with Citizen Service since it replaces the Military Academy. Some subtle differences exist between Soldiers granted by Military Academies and the Necromancers from Dread Encampments - they’re Specialist tier and provide more defense armies, provide some research benefits, and will summon additional defense armies under Martial Law instead of increasing Stability.

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That is all for this week! Next week we’ll take a look at the art process and all the effort that goes into creating the Necroid portraits!

We’ll be eagerly reading your responses, and remember that...
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Jeff sees all
 
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So, are you guys going to address:

- Broken Crises AIs.
- Broken AE AIs.
- Broken AIs in general, where FTL Inhibitors seem to be one of the main causes.
- Absurd Micromanagement of planets being required. Which could be partly resolved by making "Greater Than Ourselves" a baseline edict?
- Pops growing endlessly, where one has to manually stop growth. Rather than having a way to limit them to "a bit over jobs/housing" and automatically resume growth after they move out.
- Performance drops even on high-end PCs, where further upgrades become pointless as it's the engine that can't cope anymore.
- Performance likely partly being due to pops growing endlessly. As AI Empires end up with absurd numbers of unemployed pops. Synth ascended Empires for example will never stop growing pops on their planets.
- Etc.

Or just, advertise new DLCs?

Edit, you guys also once talked about a "Capture/Steal Relic" war goal if enough interest existed. That thread alone showed enough interest, it would especially give a goal in the mid-game. What happened to that?
 
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Weekly reminder that a DLC -no matter how interesting in concept or well in execution- for a fundamentally broken base game is entirely pointless.

On the topic: Is there anything that stops the AI from uplifting slave species into extinction and therefore killing it's own pop growth for good?
 
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So nothing about the patch...
 
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I'll just paste my response from the last Dev Diary into here:

Species packs, content packs, any other form of DLC..

I will not be investing another penny into the game, no matter how attractive they look, until the fundamentals of this game that have been mentioned a thousand times already are addressed.

I haven't played Stellaris for around 6 months, and yet I check each week for the dev diaries, in the hope that this week is the week I see some progress being made. I do this because I am desperate to play the game again. But I simply refuse to load it up again while it is in its current state.

It's a real shame, because a working Stellaris is easily one of my favourite games of all time.

It's just a big shame really.
 
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Really, people are in line to ask/demand/beg verification that you will look into the issues being reported over and over again and the official responses in the thread are about... prepatent/presapient?

Well.
 
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Won't Necrophytes lead to excessively annoying micro in many cases?

Convert a few pops then restrict the jobs in order to wait a few decades for new ones to grow (you don't want to use up all the non-converted pops, you want to breed them), add new ones to the jobs, convert, restrict job, wait, rinse/repeat...across multiple planets.
 
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It's really shame that there is no official big and detailed statement from dev team about horrific current state of the game and what steps are being done to change this. It seems like management finally gave up on Stellaris and decided to just milk a little more $ from DLC and then... and then nothing, I suppose.
 
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Uh. This isn't gonna work out very well with the current system. You can only 'grow' one pop at a time in the game right now. So how's that supposed to work with Necrophage? In the early game, you'll have the issue of maintaining alien pops vs Necrphage with a lot of micro. In the late game, you'll never realistically be able to convert even a fraction of all the pops you'll lord over. It might be slightly better if you could 'build' Necrophages and still have regular pops 'grow' on the side...

Seems very meh.
 
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More like "Let's not make promises and then disappoint." :)
It's possible to talk and not make promises while still acknowledging the problem, though. This has been discussed in other threads, and the consensus seems to be very much to be that "we're trying to do x, we can absolutely not make any promises about the results, here's what it is: [...]" would still be better than having radio silence on the issue.
 
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This has to be deliberate at this point, no one can be so thick so as not to notice the future PR nightmare.
If we ignore it, don't acknowledge it, and not respond. It's just going to go away on it's own eventually!
 
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