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Hi everyone!

As @grekulf has mentioned, one of our key aims in the upcoming Lem update is to improve the value of our existing DLCs by adding new content to them. As part of this effort, several of our species packs have seen some love. This week, I will start us off by talking about some of the upcoming changes to the Necroids species pack.

While we were overall very happy with the content that went into Necroids (indeed, it has set a high bar for our other species packs to match!), a few of us - both within the team and in the community as a whole - regretted a few of the missed opportunities. The Lem update has provided us with the opportunity to rectify this.

Necrophage Hive Minds

There have been quite a few calls for allowing Hive Minds to be Necrophages, and with Lem, this will now be possible!

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The will work similarly to normal Necrophages, but with a few differences:
  • Flavour texts that assume individual intelligences have been rewritten to fit the hive theme better
  • Hive Minds generally cannot support non-Hive individuals within their empire except as Livestock, and Necrophage Hive Minds are no different there. However, unlike other Hive Minds, Necro-Hives will allow their Livestock to procreate. The Livestock can then be subsumed into the Hive via Centers of Elevation.
    • Unlike normal Necrophages, Necro-Hive Necrophytes don’t use Consumer Goods. Instead, their upkeep of Food (or Minerals, if they are Lithoid) has been doubled.
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  • Like normal Necrophages, Necro-Hives can also use the Necrophage Purge to speed things up a bit. For this purpose (but in a change applying generally to all Hive Minds), Hive Minds are now allowed to purge Gestalt pops that are not of their main species again.
  • Making Hive Worlds make sense for Necrophages is a bit complicated, as there was previously a hard block on non-Hive pops living there - the planet would eat them, effectively. The solution we are currently working on is to allow Necro-Hive specifically to bring their Necrophytes there.
  • Just as you can combine Fanatic Purifier with Necrophage, so you can also be a Devouring Swarm (or Terravore) Necrophage

General Necrophage Changes

It has not escaped notice that Necrophages are quite strong. A lot of the things that make them cool and fun to play also make them very powerful, so it’s a fine line to tread on. However, we have managed to come up with a set of changes that bring them a bit more in line with other starts while maintaining the spirit of the Origin:
  • Non-purging Necrophages no longer start with two extra pops than other non-standard origins (purging ones keep the extra pops because they are likely to lose a few pops through purging).
  • The guaranteed primitive worlds may no longer contain primitives that have advanced beyond the Iron Age (previous limit was Steam Age), and will have more defensive armies than very early primitives usually have. This is to make their start not quite as outright better than other starts.
  • Centers of Elevation no longer provide stability bonuses, and the job’s unity output has been cut by a quarter.
  • The chance of pops escaping during Necrophage purging has been increased from 10% to 25%. This is now also communicated to players in tooltips.
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Death Cults

In contrast to Necrophages, with the advent of 3.0 and its accompanying pop growth changes, it has been felt that Death Cults - though interesting mechanically and flavour-wise - have somewhat fallen behind the curve in terms of bonuses. In other words, more reward is needed for sacrificing your pops.

One of the issues we had at the time when we implemented it was the limited possibilities for using proper mathematical formulas in Stellaris scripts. However, as hinted in my previous dev diary, that particular bottleneck has now been alleviated (in fact, we have gone considerably further than hinted there - Lem will have a lot of positive surprises for modders!).

Previously, when you chose to sacrifice your populace, you would gain a portion of the bonus as a fixed modifier, and another portion scaled by the raw number of pops you sacrificed. This remains similar, but with one key difference: the scaled modifier is now scaled by the % of your total number of pops you have sacrificed.

We are still working on the exact numbers, but the gist of this is that you will now tend to get a lot better bonuses per pop you sacrifice, especially in the early game.


Reanimated Armies

Changes have also been made to Reanimated Armies. While the fantasy of being able to reanimate corpses to fight for you was pretty cool, in practice the impact of unlocking a new army type - which you had to research a separate technology to unlock - was quite underwhelming. For that reason, a number of changes have been made:
  • You can now build Dread Encampments from day 1. Countries starting with the civic will have one on their starting planet
  • Dread Encampments are generally more useful to have now: they now provide two Necromancer jobs (up from 1), and Necromancers now produce 6 each of society and physics (up from 4), though their number of defensive armies they spawn has been cut from 4 to 3.
  • Building a Dread Encampment replaces your Defense Armies with Undead Defense Armies, which are somewhat stronger
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  • When you defeat any organic enemy army in battle, you now have a one in three chance of resurrecting them to join your own forced - in effect immediately spawning an Undead (offensive) Army
  • Finally, if an empire with Undead Armies defeats the Voidspawn or Tiyanki Matriarch, they can now resurrect them to fight in their own fleets!
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That’s all for today. Stay tuned to hear more about our plans for the Lem update!
 
This is like my third message in this thread lol but this whole thing looks very promising for the future of the game so I wanted to give my opinion about armies just because Reanimated Armies is a civic with a very strong focus on this

I know that armies are not one of the favored parts of the game to a lot of players but I do really enjoy building fortress worlds and having a lot of soldier jobs, even to the point where I just capture some chokepoints and reinforce them to death with frotresses to keep my space safe witoput building a strong navy... or a navy at all. This possibility is often unexplored and can bring unique gameplay experiences, something nice and fun and also great from a RP perspective.

Even when this is possible, armies are secundary to warfare most of the times.

For this reason I would like to have dread encampments (DE) and military academies (MA) to be normal buildings instead of planet uniques that can be built many times in a single world.

Let me make an argument for that:

One MA or DE can give +100/+110 exp points to armies. Any army can get the experienced rank with that EXP amount getting a bonus of +10% to damage and moral, something minuscule and useless in most of cases. 1000 exp is needed for veteran rank which gives 20% bonus on damage and moral and 10% health bonus. This is nice but far from gamebreaking and very difficult to get (or even notice) in game.

Is it worth building this kind of buildings? not really right now, even Lem's DE's are not good enough to be compared with research labs for the output, or with strongholds for the upkeep and FTL inhibition upgrade. One could say that only one DE is required in the whole empire to be able to recruit reanimated armies and nothing more... which is a shame because this civic can be waaaay cooler than that.

Now let's imagine DE's and MA's have no build limit per planet.

Yes, it doesn't change anything, nothing is broken and exp buildings are still not very attractive BUT it opens a door for a very fun way of specializing a planet:
Drafting planets.

A player can now recruit veteran armies, the cost = a planet dedicated just for that, all building slots filled with MA's or DE's... and losing a planet that can generate so much resources just to get stronger armies seems fair and fun RP wise.

Even DE's are still balanced this way. Necromancers are weird, they give research, naval capacity and armies, so they are kinda like an hybrid between researchers and soldiers. In order to make them balanced they can't excel in either of those roles and being quite honest, they don't actually, not even with the Lem update changes.

Yes, they provide more society and physics research but no engineer research which is the most important one, and all this for the same upkeep cost and without being able to improve the building later on.

Yes they provide the same naval cap a soldier does, and even more and improved defense armies but necromenacers are jobs that requires CG's upkeep and DE's can't be upgraded unlike strogholds that can get FTL inhibitors when upgraded + 2 more jobs.

Unrestricted DE's may lead to having worlds full of necromancers raising super strong veteran zombies, giving a lot of naval cap while also having a greater output in society and physics research than a normal tech world. All this is balanced by the fact that you are not getting engineering research while still having to pay full price in CG's for research and without being able to upgrade the buildings (huge offset) to improve the numbers.

In short terms, this is basically like having researchers trading engineering research for naval cap and more and better planetary armies. This is now a civic that changes completely the game style, this is something we really need on this game.

Overall I think that this little change in army exp buildings + the changes being proposed in the dev diary 16 may lead to a different approach at playing with armies, giving more variety to the game and giving a good incentive to players to buy necroids DLC without unabalancing the game.

FInally... we need to be fair, having planets full of necromancers raising zombie armies is something that sounds like too much fun to let it slip. I bet that this changes will make reanimated armies a B or A tier civic in competitive; and an S tier for fun and RPing.
 
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Not a fan of the nerophage purge nerf. Slowing it down already made it a suboptimal choice versus just keeping the pops, and this change means you'll never use it unless forced to (e.g., dealing with hivemind pops). Aside from that use-case it was never that strong of an option.
 
Not sure, honestly I think it's a thing we've wanted to do for a while, but have never quite had the time for before now. But it's definitely something I'm very excited about, myself!
While youre at it, would you consider introducing repeatable traditions, one for each swappable tree? They could replace ambitions in a more unique way and scale up in cost linearly like repeatable techs.
 
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While we are on topic of space crystals - do Lithoids get any special flavour text or something regarding space crystals?

Can't really remember, but I think it would be neat.
 
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Let me left it here

I suggest creating the option of transforming of conquered population into something like cyborgs or 'zombies'.
FP cannot left any other race to survive but what about transforming into walking mechanism?

It would be something less than slaves rather biorobots.
And it would obviously require to spend influence points to overcome resistance of 'purist' faction of FP society.

I agree that it should require some biological and/or engineering technology.

May be we can make some mod based on Necroid pack.

Actual mechanism can look like Discension or Down lifting.
 
I do find it very ironic, that the first species pack you work on is necroids.
You said yourself it set a pretty high bar for the others and you're raising that bar even higher. All of this sounds amazing.
I honestly didn't know i needed undead space monsters, but apparantly i do now. And turning deafeated enemy armies into your armies? This is going to be amazing. If you build a strong enough army early on you might never need to build new armies again if you overwhelm enemy forces with enough power to get out with more armies than you came in with.
Just flavour-wise this is going to be amazing.

The Custodian Initiative is off to a great start. :)
 
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Hive Minds generally cannot support non-Hive individuals within their empire except as Livestock
I'm VERY curious about this design choice. Why is it being so rigidly stuck to, and thus why are 'friendly hives' being so rigidly forbidden?
and Necromancers now produce 6 each of society and physics (up from 4), though their number of defensive armies they spawn has been cut from 4 to 3.
Have you considered renaming Necromancers as Reanimators? Less 'magic wizards' and more 'sci-fi frankenstein'?
 
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Have you considered renaming Necromancers as Reanimators? Less 'magic wizards' and more 'sci-fi frankenstein'?
Screen Shot 2021-06-18 at 8.48.27 AM.png

Yes.

This belongs in a sci-fi game.
 
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Honestly the reanimated armise could be made even stronger. How about making reanimated armies immune to bombardment? Your necromancers can just reanimate the armies they need when enemy troops land.

Also, "
  • When you defeat any organic enemy army in battle, you now have a one in three chance of resurrecting them to join your own forced - in effect immediately spawning an Undead (offensive) Army"
This happens during battles, right? Enemy army unit dies 1/3 it changes side (is reanimated) and fights for you in the battle.

This is stil not a great civic for minmaxing but I do like the flavor.
 
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