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!

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.

• 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.

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

• 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!

That’s all for today. Stay tuned to hear more about our plans for the Lem update!

 

[Shimohi]

Proper UI scaling please.

 

[TormentedTUNDRA]

Necroid's still need a colossus weapon variant that either replaces neutron sweeper or as an alt tech and it converts enemy populations in necrophages.

 

[Korp]

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.

Hard to imagine that there would be enough left off something killed by orbital bombardment to reanimate.

 

[Szatan2000]

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!

View attachment 732533

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.

View attachment 732550

• 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.

View attachment 732551

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

View attachment 732552

• 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!

View attachment 732555


That’s all for today. Stay tuned to hear more about our plans for the Lem update!

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!

View attachment 732533

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.

View attachment 732550

• 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.

View attachment 732551

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

View attachment 732552

• 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!

View attachment 732555


That’s all for today. Stay tuned to hear more about our plans for the Lem update!

Will we be able to resurrect space dragons maybe?

 

[Methone]

Will we be able to resurrect space dragons maybe?

Am I the only one who's getting sick of space dragons? Like, they had it for Leviathans, sure. Then they recycled the model for one of the L-Gate outcomes. Then they recycled it for Shard; enough already!

 

[Fulgrymm]

Some kind of Space Lithovore that competes with the mining drones for prime asteroids would be neat.

 

[HFY]

Some kind of Space Lithovore that competes with the mining drones for prime asteroids would be neat.

Crystal creatures seem like they fill that role.

 

[Fulgrymm]

Crystal creatures seem like they fill that role.

I was thinking more... creaturey and less animate crystally.

 

[Nevars]

Necrophage nerfing their guaranteed primitive worlds make sense but nerfing chamber of elevation is painful and I don't know why it need to be double nerf, not provide stability is ok maybe stability is too op but even reduce their unity output too...

This is where I think the nerf is too far, I get it that guaranteed primitive is too op, extra starting pop maybe too good, bonus stability is a bit dubious that is it really too good but even cut on their unity, yea no I disagree about this nerf.

Also nerfing chamber elevation will only drive people into exploiting nacropurge which is one of the reason people whinning necrophage is op instead because even before this nerf CoE is already too weak, the reason I even building it is to convert pop, I gimped myself cuz I don't like purge, the bonus they currently give at least help me alleviate myself that hey this isn't quite suboptimal at least they give me stability and unity.

With this nerf though I think the purge looks favourable, I would have to steel my heart a bit but need must I guess.

Though the change with death cult and reanimated army are cool, I always felt they are too weak before now I can't wait to try them on again when the patch arrive.

 

[DurianKing]

Am I the only one who's getting sick of space dragons? Like, they had it for Leviathans, sure. Then they recycled the model for one of the L-Gate outcomes. Then they recycled it for Shard; enough already!

yeah, maybe the Custodians could inject a little variety into the models here.

 

[HFY]

I was thinking more... creaturey and less animate crystally.

Ah, well, maybe crystal model components set up in more creature-y shapes?

Am I the only one who's getting sick of space dragons? Like, they had it for Leviathans, sure. Then they recycled the model for one of the L-Gate outcomes. Then they recycled it for Shard; enough already!

L-Squid

Tiyanki models recycled, but with threatening tentacles and huge angry eyebrows, instead of more dragons.

 

[grommile]

How about making reanimated armies immune to bombardment?

incendiaries and high explosives are two of the four traditional permanent deanimation techniques.

(the others being shotguns and chainsaws)

 

[Jamaican Castle]

(the others being shotguns and chainsaws)

So what I'm hearing here is that we need orbital bombardment chainsaws.

 

[Amightypie]

Don't suppose there is news on a machine shipset?

 

[-Marauder-]

Are you playing it right? If you conquer the primitives immediately, that's a huge jump in pops. Pops are king in stellaris. This nerd was justified.

Ring worlds are already getting more nerfs. So don't bring them up in your argument since they're already getting hit. Heck, they've already been hit once. This is the second update affecting them.

Void dwellers are only as strong as they are because research habitats in general are stupidly strong. And anyone with a decent tech rush can start benefiting early on. Anyone who played void dwellers pre 3.0 and post 3.0 know they've been hit as well. And they may just introduce more nerfs for them.

These nerfs are being dropped for everything. Not just necrophage, and judging by the communities reaction, they also feel its justified. The playstyle itself isn't changed. They're just slowed down. The fun still exists

The community is a horrible benchmark for "what feels justified" much less is balanced. Then again, I'm not talking about the goddamn pops. I'm talking about the other nerfs. The nerf to chamber of elevation is a whooping 5/10 stability gone, just like that. Then they also decided to cripple the amenity production of necrophytes.

You can argue that the pop nerf was justified, sure thing. I don't mind. Also nerfing amenities and stability on top of that is overkill. Especially since the origin forces you to forego void dwellers (which straight up starts with three habitats, meaning tripple growth right away) and Shattered Ring.

 

[SilverBurst23]

Some kind of Space Lithovore that competes with the mining drones for prime asteroids would be neat.

*flies to Terravore home planet, pushes head inside palace*.

DID YOU REALLY EAT THAT? IT WAS MY DESSERT!!!!!

 

[Meebleborp]

The community is a horrible benchmark for "what feels justified" much less is balanced. Then again, I'm not talking about the goddamn pops. I'm talking about the other nerfs. The nerf to chamber of elevation is a whooping 5/10 stability gone, just like that. Then they also decided to cripple the amenity production of necrophytes.

You can argue that the pop nerf was justified, sure thing. I don't mind. Also nerfing amenities and stability on top of that is overkill. Especially since the origin forces you to forego void dwellers (which straight up starts with three habitats, meaning tripple growth right away) and Shattered Ring.

Man, when you said the community is a horrible benchmark for balance, I wasn't expecting you to prove it yourself.

About that whole VD having triple growth thing...

Here's the starting growth rate on a Necrophage homeworld:

And here's starting growth on a VD habitat:

So Necrophages start with about 5 growth, while VD starts with 9. Not triple - not even double - but still more, right? Necrophages also start with 2 more pops, but that might be getting changed. Still, this is how things are currently.

Now let's look at what happens when one of the two smaller VD habitats hits 10 pop:

Huh. Half growth until an upgraded capitol building is constructed (480 days). Okay that brings things down a bit.

What about when this habitat has completed the building and then gets an additional pop?

Okay, quickly queue up a housing district!

Wait that made it worse?!

Well okay, not forever. Just for the entire duration of the build again. Then we're fine for a couple more pops, until we're out of districts and can't upgrade the habitat for a couple decades...

I think you get the idea. It's nowhere near triple growth at the start, and it quickly drops down from there. Then it bounces around for a bit, and can end up becoming crippling if you don't properly time your further expansion. But how are Necrophages doing around that point? I mean surely they must be suffering due to having worse growth.

Huh, 65 pops seems like a lot. And they've got 14-15 growth total between 3 colonies.

What about VD?

Oh only a 20+ pop difference 15 years into the game. And rather than getting extra logistic growth, VD is right around 0 at best. Weird how "triple growth" VD ended up the equivalent of 11-12 growth points per month behind. Wonder how that happened...

 

[15JTaylor]

The community is a horrible benchmark for "what feels justified" much less is balanced. Then again, I'm not talking about the goddamn pops. I'm talking about the other nerfs. The nerf to chamber of elevation is a whooping 5/10 stability gone, just like that. Then they also decided to cripple the amenity production of necrophytes.

You can argue that the pop nerf was justified, sure thing. I don't mind. Also nerfing amenities and stability on top of that is overkill. Especially since the origin forces you to forego void dwellers (which straight up starts with three habitats, meaning tripple growth right away) and Shattered Ring.

Now I know where you're coming from. Sorry for the confusion. The nerf to the chamber is rather confusing as to the necessity of it but I guess we'll see just how bad it is. I'm not to fussed over ring world and void dwellers being stronger since they've already said they're working on nerfs. I support the changes to the primitive worlds, defense army, and purge changes. But the chamber is worrisome. But the devs already assured us that if the nerfs go to far, they'll walk back on them. I'm super excited to try hive mind necrophage though.

 

[Caeric]

Now I know where you're coming from. Sorry for the confusion. The nerf to the chamber is rather confusing as to the necessity of it but I guess we'll see just how bad it is. I'm not to fussed over ring world and void dwellers being stronger since they've already said they're working on nerfs. I support the changes to the primitive worlds, defense army, and purge changes. But the chamber is worrisome. But the devs already assured us that if the nerfs go to far, they'll walk back on them. I'm super excited to try hive mind necrophage though.

It seems a tad counterproductive. If people are primarily skipping it to a large degree in favor of purging due to bad yields and being too slow it would seem further incentives are needed to use it over the purge. If you need more necrophage pops you'd probably rather get them immediately by purging despite the nerf rather than wait 10 yrs for 3/6 more.

Or at least that's the impression I get from this thread.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

It occured to me that removing Stability bonus from the Necrophage building might be a terrible mistake for Hivemind Necrophages.

Do you know what happens if you conquer pops as a Hivemind? They become unhappy. Hiveminded pops don't have happyness, instead its always at 50% which means neither positive nor negative effects on stability. But as soon as you add non-Hiveminded pops, your stability is going to get reduced because these pops are unhappy.

You can also observe this with the Baol relic as a Hivemind. If you use it, you get 4 pops which are livestock and as such they are unhappy. Those 4 pops is enough to lower stability by so much that you can start getting bad events, which may lower stability by 20.

We have not seen the stats of Necro-Hivemind and neither have we seen the stats of the livestock. Of course Necro-Hiveminds need different Necrophage stats than normal necroids. They don't have ruler and specialist jobs, so they need bonus ressource output for all drones and preferably reduced amenity usage and reduced upkeep. But whats most important for the starting livestock: They need to be nerve-stapled from the start. This removes their happyness and makes sure you don't end up with terrible stability.

If you don't do this, I can see Necro-Hivemind being extremely frustrating to play as you have to constantly juggle your livestock pops and stability.