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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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Week #1 of separating out the Dev replies for visibility ;)

@Gruntsatwork replies:

The Agrarian Idyll issue is definitely a good point, I'll bring it up for discussion, no promises that it will get the masterful crafters treatment but I agree that the current implementation clashes with the way we hand out building slots.

I do believe the restrictions on pleasure seekers are both for mechanical and flavour reasons, as well not wanting to infringe upon stratified economy.

One question - does having this Civic make the Instrument of Desire more partial towards your civilization? Or have any special interactions with your species if you decide to 'unwisely' psionically ascend? For reasons.
Not yet but now that you have said it...it really should.

@Alfray Stryke replies:

Objulen said:
This Civic pairs very well with Agrarian Idyll. Since you can't get Ecumenopoli, mixing Farms with Industrial Sectors could be an interesting mix. This would also lend itself to Catalytic Processing
This sounds like a fun combo, thanks for the suggestion for my next game.
 
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In the tease for this week's dev diary there was a notification showing that the clone pops were decreasing due to lack of clone vats. Is this something specific to the civic or is there going to be a general change to the pop system that improves the mechanics of declining pops?
 
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Please give Agrarian Idyll something equivalent to Masterful Crafters, where they get 1 extra unlocked Building Slot per 3 or 4 Farming Districts!

They're currently put between a rock and a hard place, RP-wise, because it doesn't fit their ideology to construct a lot of City Districts, in fact ideally they'd only ever want to construct 2 or 3 on even a huge planet, and only 1 one most colonies, but on the other hand they're forced to construct them in order to unlock Building slots.

In general, the whole "City Districts unlocks Building slots" game mechanic needs to be overhauled, because it incentivized weird behavioral patterns, but the play style that is hit the hardest by it is Agrarian Idyll.
 
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Any chance of Agrarian Idyll getting the "Masterful Crafters" treatment, in regards to building slots?
(The civic used to be about building generator/mining/farming districts instead of city districts for housing,
but as of 3.0 they have to build just as many city districts as everyone else to get their building slots.)
 
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Why Pleasure Seekers are not compatible with Shared burden :( Pleasure Seekers + Shared burden + Mechanist origin would be perfect Fully automated luxury gay space communism
 
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In the tease for this week's dev diary there was a notification showing that the clone pops were decreasing due to lack of clone vats. Is this something specific to the civic or is there going to be a general change to the pop system that improves the mechanics of declining pops?
I assume that's something that's either being scrapped, or still needs enough balancing that they don't want to talk about it? If you look at the clone vats tooltips, it talks about being able to sustain X clone pops, with the x being redacted
 
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More stuff locked off for hiveminds.

Awesome. :(
 
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The Agrarian Idyll issue is definitely a good point, I'll bring it up for discussion, no promises that it will get the masterful crafters treatment but I agree that the current implementation clashes with the way we hand out building slots.
 
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Nice, Squats and Eldar.
 
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Interesting. Though I feel like there is a lot of information missing about this new Origin, just like a lot of information is missing on Hivemind Necrophages back when you released that dev diary. I'm still waiting on the actual pop details of Necrophage Hiveminds. And you never answered my question about how you will solve the stability issues from all those unhappy livestock slaves. Unless of course you decided to use the solution I gave you and make the starting livestock pops nerve stapled. Hopefully we will have more information on that soon.

Is it 7 pop assembly per clone vat? So assuming your empire starts with 2 of these on your planet, you start with 14 pop assembly? That would be a lot. The description states pop assembly is going to get lower the more clone vats you build. So what is the minimum pop assembly from this building?

Will this origin have 2 species? One is your starting species and another the clone species? Or is it only going to be clones?

I guess there will be a questline associated with this Origin? I guess eventually you can modify the species and maybe they can reproduce again?

I presume this Origin is not available for Hiveminds?

This Origin seems mysterious and its too difficult for me to judge how powerful it is. Therefore its difficult to assess how much value this adds to the Humanoids species pack. With the Plantoid species pack it was easier to asess how much value it adds to the game.

The Plantoid species pack added some Synergy with Tomb World Origin, although you should be aware of the fact that Tomb World Origin is one of the worst Origins in the entire game simply because the bonuses granted by it are too weak. Its balanced properly in Stefans balance mod, so please adopt the balance changes in this mod.

Nevertheless I am happy you decided to keep these civics on Origins open for all portrait types. Hopefully you will do a bunch of balance changes and get the numbers right so we can enjoy a bit more variety with these civics and origin from both species packs.
 
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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.
I like this - and feel like the effect could probably also be applied to mining guilds and agrarian idyl, for mining and farm districts, respectively?
all 3 of those additions are NOT portrait-locked.
Just to be clear, for the clone origin, will we also get the option to lock the appearance and/or sex (if it exists) of pops to a specific look - so they all look the same - or, for simplicity, to match that of our initial leader?

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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Does this affect unemployed pops / add new jobs at all? As it seems pretty similar to the Hedonist job for FE's:
1629372241153.png
 
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