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Stellaris Dev Diary #220 - Additions to Humanoids Species Pack

Hello everyone, it is Thursday and that means it is time for your weekly dev diary. Today, we will talk a bit more in-depth about the upcoming additions to the Humanoids species pack.

First, let us take a look at the civics that will be added.

Masterful Crafters

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The Masterful Crafters Civic, previously teased in Dev Diary 214, will replace your Artisans with a new job type called Artificiers. They will fulfil the same basic production needs as Artisans, Consumer Goods that is, while also producing some extra Trade Value and Engineering Research. As you might expect, since they focus on Consumer Goods, this civic will not be available for gestalt empires.

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To facilitate you focusing your empire more on the industrial branch, this civic will also make industrial districts grant building slots.

Our hope is to allow you a bit more leeway in how you want to play your empire, whether you go hard into artificers to capitalize on their bonus production or use their superior production to cut back on how much you have to build up your consumer goods industry.

And of course, before anyone can ask, let me assure you, yes, it's dwarfs, it's most definitely dwarfs.

For the more materialistic among us, megacorporations will have their own mirror version of this civic.

Pleasure Seekers

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Now let us talk about our second new civic, Pleasure Seekers. This new civic grants you access to the Decadent Lifestyle Living Standard, which increases happiness and consumer goods upkeep for all affected pops.

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In addition, the Entertainer job will now also grant +1% pop growth and Servants jobs will produce an additional 5 Amenities.

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Quite a potent mix of happiness and the means of keeping it up. Of course, if you are interested in an experiment or two, you could fill entire worlds with entertainers for the pop growth bonus, one might call it a planet-wide shore leave on Risa.

Now with both of these civics covered, it is time to talk about our biggest addition to the Humanoids DLC, the topic of this week's spoiler tweet, and our new origin.

As with the civic above, Pleasure Seekers also have a mirror-version for megacorporations.

Clone Army

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What do you do when you outlive your usefulness/your creators? That is the question you can dive into with the Clone Army origin.

As Clone Soldiers, your empire will be perfectly suited for warfare, even though you may not currently have any enemies. Your lives and continued existence will depend on your Ancient Clone Vat buildings, which support your population.

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Did we mention that there is a limit to how many Ancient Clone Vats you can have in your empire at the same time? There is, it is 5.

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Now, you could be a good little clone-soldier and simply wage war as you were designed to, or, you could dive into the secrets of your own history, that choice will be left to you for every playthrough.

Oh, you can also combine Clone Army with both Masterful Crafters and Pleasure Seekers.

One more thing worth mentioning, all 3 of those additions are NOT portrait-locked. Some have ethic or competing civic restrictions though.

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And with that, I shall leave you be for this week and I hope to see you for the next dev diary.
 
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More stuff locked off for hiveminds.

Awesome. :(
Have you ever tried the mod hive queens? I can't remember the exact name but it is joked as 'the forgotten DLC" since as of currently hiveminds are just robots that eat food or minerals instead of energy.
Honestly I hope that either custodians or the other team (forgot their name) will add something like this mod in as it would add so much flavour
 
Pretty nice! All of the cosmetic DLCs seem to be at a similar level of quality, now.

Pleasure Seekers seems incredibly powerful: is there no worry that it might make Utopian Abundance irrelevant?
They may add in a slightly, Slaneshian surprise for those who go pleasure seekers...
Look up what happened to the Eldar's empire along with their Gods
 
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Considering how both Pleasure Seekers and Decadent Lifestyle are designed with elite/privileged species/class focus shouldn't it be restricted to non-Egalitarians or stright up Authoritarian-only?

I could definitely see Decadent Lifestyle as restricted to non-Egalitariains. However, Pleasure Seekers + Egalitarianism = Iain Banks' The Culture. Nothing contradictory about being egalitarian and hedonistic space hippies, it seems to me.
 
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One thing I do not understand about the Clone Soldiers origin: How do they expand? If there's a limited number of Ancient Clone Vats, and the Vats have limited capacity, doesn't that mean there's a hard cap on empire population?

It would make sense if the Empire Limit increased as the empire controls more planets and star systems or with techs, same way the Starbase Limit does, but there seems to be no indication of such.

Seems like a hard-cap on *founder species* population, but not the whole empire population. You know how, when you are playing Void Dweller origin, you can't take advantage of colonizing nice, big, fat, juicy planets nearby? At least until you send an army to land on and conquer a planet?

That suddenly gives you a secondary race with traits that take advantage of the planet rather than being penalize by it. So, you end up with the Void Dwellers spawning armies to take over one planet, and after that you use the new dirt-ball-loving races to build colony ships for all the planets the Void Dwellers cannot easily settle on.

I think Clone Soldiers is sort of like that. They are a huge advantage to early military conquest--so they boost your military start. However, eventually you will hit a population limit where you can't make enough of them to keep on fueling your millitary expansion. That's when you have to start switching late-game to using secondary races as your military force.

So, the Clone soldiers origin gives you a real leg-up in the early game--but you pay for it in the late game by not being able to build enough pops if you use Clone soldiers exclusively. (At least that's my take on it.)
 
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I could definitely see Decadent Lifestyle as restricted to non-Egalitariains. However, Pleasure Seekers + Egalitarianism = Iain Banks' The Culture. Nothing contradictory about being egalitarian and hedonistic space hippies, it seems to me.
Ah, a man of The Culture.

Definitely right - and tempting to slap it on Shattered Ring origin to get the Orbital org.. I mean festivities.
 
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Ok. This probably won't be seen by the devs, but the fact that clone soldiers can't be gene modded seems like a forced restriction. You're telling me the lads down in Camino can't boost up their genes just a tad? I mean, I could understand restricting venerable and enduring, but a society based entirely on a gene modded caste system seems like itd be cool af to rp.
 
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Ok. This probably won't be seen by the devs, but the fact that clone soldiers can't be gene modded seems like a forced restriction. You're telling me the lads down in Camino can't boost up their genes just a tad? I mean, I could understand restricting venerable and enduring, but a society based entirely on a gene modded caste system seems like itd be cool af to rp.
I think the idea is that the clones don't quite understand the technology they are made with and thus can't alter it. I do think and hope that there will be some story thing with that origin that will allow you to genenmod the clones at some point.
 
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I think the idea is that the clones don't quite understand the technology they are made with and thus can't alter it. I do think and hope that there will be some story thing with that origin that will allow you to genenmod the clones at some point.

Yeah, if you go full Bio Ascension you should absolutely learn whatever secrets your ancient clone vats hold.
 
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Clone Army feels like it should be an origin; not a civic.
Eeeerrrr... I don't know if you have noticed, but the Dev Diary lets pretty clear that Clone Army is a Origin.
 
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But.. If Pleasure Seekers locks out slaver guilds.. And Pleasure Seekers give bonuses to entertainers and domestic slaves..

Doesn't that mean I need to keep xeno scum in my pristine hedonistic empire?
 
IIRC, servant jobs for robots requires the Domestic Protocols trait, which in turn requires the Droids tech, which may take a while to research.
Until then, it's either xeno slavery or no servants at all (edit: unless the restrictions are relaxed or other sources of servants are added, such as servant jobs from Luxury Residences).

Will non-enslaving AI empires with the Pleasure Seekers civic understand that they should build robots, and give their droids the Domestic Protocols trait once they get the chance?
 
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Good soldiers follow orders. Good soldiers follow orders...
 
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IIRC, servant jobs for robots requires the Domestic Protocols trait, which in turn requires the Droids tech, which may take a while to research.
Until then, it's either xeno slavery or no servants at all (edit: unless the restrictions are relaxed or other sources of servants are added, such as servant jobs from Luxury Residences).

Will non-enslaving AI empires with the Pleasure Seekers civic understand that they should build robots, and give their droids the Domestic Protocols trait once they get the chance?

Hm.. Suppose in theory the living standard itself could make unemployed pops servants. =o

..Right uh what does it do? Unity generating hedonists? X)
 
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IIRC, servant jobs for robots requires the Domestic Protocols trait, which in turn requires the Droids tech, which may take a while to research.
Until then, it's either xeno slavery or no servants at all (edit: unless the restrictions are relaxed or other sources of servants are added, such as servant jobs from Luxury Residences).

Will non-enslaving AI empires with the Pleasure Seekers civic understand that they should build robots, and give their droids the Domestic Protocols trait once they get the chance?
Wait noooooo! I want entertainers to replace servants if you don't want to use slavery :(
 
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