Stellaris Dev Diary #226 - Custodians & Next Steps

[Enfield_PDX]

But...what's the ETA on 3.1.3? It's quite frankly a little concerning we're talking about the next 2 major patches before talking about a very necessary hotfix to numerous bug and balance issues Lem introduced, especially when the last hotfix came with a list of "known issues" as large as its fixes (and that didn't even include some really important bugs). I really hope that this whole Custodian initiative isn't falling victim to the same trap the main team seems to have, whereby a focus on ever-further-off reworks means a desire not to make many tweaks to what is here now.

I'll be open about this, there are no plans for a 3.1.3 right now. A hotfix is generally something we do to resolve issues that *must* be fixed. 3.1.2 was aimed at some obvious issues that we could fix quickly and efficiently and in a couple of cases fixes that didn't make the release build.

As it stands right now, there's nothing in 3.1.2 that I would consider hot fix worthy. That includes the fleet manager issues. The Desync from custom UI mods in MP, etc.

They are annoying, but generally speaking the vast majority of players games right now are totally untouched by them, they will be addressed in our next release, but to get to that release without causing issues, we have to focus our attention on 3.2 without stop starting to make small patches.

 

[Liggi]

Any plans to share an updated roadmap soon?

It'd be really fantastic to see a general spread of upcoming priorities (in no particular order) for the team, just to get an idea of where the game might be going in the future.

 

[James Fire]

I'll be open about this, there are no plans for a 3.1.3 right now. A hotfix is generally something we do to resolve issues that *must* be fixed. 3.1.2 was aimed at some obvious issues that we could fix quickly and efficiently and in a couple of cases fixes that didn't make the release build.

As it stands right now, there's nothing in 3.1.2 that I would consider hot fix worthy. That includes the fleet manager issues. The Desync from custom UI mods in MP, etc.

They are annoying, but generally speaking the vast majority of players games right now are totally untouched by them, they will be addressed in our next release, but to get to that release without causing issues, we have to focus our attention on 3.2 without stop starting to make small patches.

Okay, so, no.

The desync issue a big one. You say you support modders. This is your chance to prove it.

I know what causes the desync. It is repeatable, replicable, and testable. There is frankly no way it would take more than a day for 1 programmer to fix it, given these circumstances. And if I somehow know all this, and you guys don't, something is very wrong here. Usually I say "We have no idea what's going on behind the scenes", cause really, we don't. This time though, I know enough out here to know that this is a deliberate choice by someone that doesn't understand the impact this is having.

Gigastructures has ~290k subs. Even if only 5% of them do multi, that is still 14.5k people. Custom UI is integral to the functioning of the mod, as the Sertings Menu appears on game start. So you've got a desync right off the bat.

After that, your choices are to either disable all the content that uses custom UI (All 3 Crises, Achievements, and several megastructures), or reload the game every time someone interact with a custom UI, and hope that whatever you did in it stays through the reload. Neither of these options are reasonable.

Not fixing this also goes beyond just halting basically any decently modded multiplayer. This is frankly disrespectful to the mod authors that will have to deal with the reports of these desyncs for 2 months til 3.2. All we can say is "go blame PDX". And that's a terrible feeling. Knowing exactly what the problem is, and how it could have easily been fixed, but I have to tell them it wasn't because someone at PDX decided that this time, desyncs are apparently not important.

Surely you can spare 1 person to fix this issue, and put out a hotfix for it? You don't need to get the whole team on it. It's 1 bug.

 

[MrFreake_PDX]

We have a lot of posts of people saying "I'm playing as a Megacorp, so why am I surrounded by Megacorps?" Or people being annoyed about having a lot of Fanatic Purifiers or Swarms generated next to them.

I've asked devs about this on several occasions, and there are no special mechanics that make your neighbors the same/opposite ethics/authority that I've been able to get anyone to admit to. These things are truely, randomly generated, and these complaints are the net result of millions of games generated. Whether there should be something that say, stops two MegaCorps from spawning next to one another, is a game design/programming difficulty decision and another story.

 

[AttitudeAdjuster]

Any plans to share an updated roadmap soon?

It'd be really fantastic to see a general spread of upcoming priorities (in no particular order) for the team, just to get an idea of where the game might be going in the future.

in 5 years of stellaris this post is about the closest to a roadmap i've ever seen, so i'm pretty satisfied on that front ;D

 

[blahmaster6k]

I just want to stress that I hope you abandonned the idea of using Unity for Administration. I don't see that being interresting in the slightest.

On the contrary, I think it's a great idea. It would give unity a reason to be something empires actually need to have and would provide a reason to pick Spiritualist, which has almost always been one of the worst ethics choices.

 

[Nebbie Zebbie]

I'll be open about this, there are no plans for a 3.1.3 right now. A hotfix is generally something we do to resolve issues that *must* be fixed. 3.1.2 was aimed at some obvious issues that we could fix quickly and efficiently and in a couple of cases fixes that didn't make the release build.

As it stands right now, there's nothing in 3.1.2 that I would consider hot fix worthy. That includes the fleet manager issues. The Desync from custom UI mods in MP, etc.

They are annoying, but generally speaking the vast majority of players games right now are totally untouched by them, they will be addressed in our next release, but to get to that release without causing issues, we have to focus our attention on 3.2 without stop starting to make small patches.

I'm quite frankly shocked. Of the things 3.1.2 fixed, I'd say only 2 are critical (Elder One exploit and locked 0% hab), in that they would effectively allow a player to put their own empire or another in an unexpectedly unrecoverable state, and surely such a severe desync, or the 1-month-warning-asteroid bug, would be considered of similar severity. I would surely expect, given history even from the previous "Dick" patch cycle, a second minor patch to address serious issues while knocking out low-hanging fruit (Mastercraft Inc.'s problem, the relic capture being impossible bug, etc.) and making minor balance tweaks.
I am hopeful that an open beta will eliminate the need for multiple minor followup patches from 3.3's reworks in February, but I am still rather worried about things given it seems like the process of releasing a patch is so extremely disruptive to operations. I suppose 3.2 will involve dealing with technical debt rather than incurring it as 3.1 did, but November is a long ways away...hopefully it truly will be quite the bundle of fixes and balance tweaks.

 

[Foxosaur]

Honestly, a public Kanban board that just shows the high level "List" - split out with "Started" "Doing" "Done", with the ability for the community to upvote things in the "List". Allow the developers to add any context / updates (if/as they want too).

QA people submit the list items (probably could automate an import/export) - and every month or set period of time you pick the highest or "fixable" ones. A special column for "Complicated" to shove things over that you just don't have time for right now. Maybe you can commit to taking on 2-3 "Complicated" every period so they do eventually get dealt with.

Those picked issues just get moved to "Started", and every e.g. Week or custom period you update the movement of those items that may have moved to Started -> Doing -> Done.

Don't think would take a lot of time and would be very engaging for most of your community I think ^^

Example below - I'm sure Paradox would find a nice way to brand it and make it look like its part of a Stellaris UI

 

[Aerolfos]

I'll be open about this, there are no plans for a 3.1.3 right now. A hotfix is generally something we do to resolve issues that *must* be fixed. 3.1.2 was aimed at some obvious issues that we could fix quickly and efficiently and in a couple of cases fixes that didn't make the release build.

As it stands right now, there's nothing in 3.1.2 that I would consider hot fix worthy. That includes the fleet manager issues. The Desync from custom UI mods in MP, etc.

They are annoying, but generally speaking the vast majority of players games right now are totally untouched by them, they will be addressed in our next release, but to get to that release without causing issues, we have to focus our attention on 3.2 without stop starting to make small patches.

With all due respect, but personally I see at least 5 (usually more) people creating bug reports in mods *daily* for the desync issue, and disagree strongly. This is exactly the kind of issue that has been hotfixed in the past as critical.

Any kind of modded multiplayer is effectively dead until November, and I've seen several scheduled games not happen. Anecdotal perhaps, but there's quite a lot of people that wanted to coop against the new Blokkat crisis from Gigastructures, which is effectively not possible in 3.1.

 

[James Fire]

Save yourself a lot of hassle and testing: just do away with sprawl and everything related to it. Stop punishing people for playing a 4X game well.

Because a) That's not at all realistic b) it's been in the game since the start. c) "Just remove this mechanic I clearly don't undersrand" is not an argument.

Mod it out if you want.

 

[Limbojack]

God, how I love the custodian initiative. After several years of development, all games would benefit from something similar. Well done. And I can't wait to see what the next update will bring to the game.

 

[Losttruppen]

in 5 years of stellaris this post is about the closest to a roadmap i've ever seen, so i'm pretty satisfied on that front ;D

Back in february 2019 in Dev Diary #141 Grekulf gave a pretty good list of things they had on their plate:

DISCLAIMER: THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST, NOR IS ANYTHING FINAL OR CERTAIN TO HAPPEN

Future goals (in no particular order):

• Pop growth: Look into how immigration/emigration works, try to make base growth across multiple planets less powerful, make habitability matter more again
• Sectors & automation: Allow players to nudge which sectors planets belong to, reduce micromanagement by improving sector management tools
• Backgrounds: Split up some civics into backgrounds, and add more backgrounds.
• Civic flavour: Spend more time on making the civics feel more unique and fun
• Institutions: Define which institutions make up your empire’s internal departments (such as Diplomatic Corps, Xenology Bureau etc.), and their funding, size and power.
• Espionage: Intel to determine how much you know about another empire, spy actions, cloaking, sabotage & general mischief.
• Religion & Cults: Similar to factions, cults could appear in your empire during certain circumstances. Spiritualist empires would most likely have “imperial” cults. Worship of powerful entities etc.
• Archaeology: Explore the ruins of ancient civilizations
• Subject contracts: Allow overlords to better customize what type of subjects they have, tribute levels, benefits to subject etc.
• Federation depth: Allow federations to level up, have different election types, taxes etc.
• Galactic Council: Create a sort of a ‘space UN’ with galactic politics and diplomacy
• Primitives: Allow for more interactions with primitive pre-FTL species

I would say we have seen quite a bit of this list added since then. I would certainly be interested to see an update to this and perhaps a new one for the Primary team and one for the Custodians.

 

[Ahtan]

I'll be open about this, there are no plans for a 3.1.3 right now. A hotfix is generally something we do to resolve issues that *must* be fixed. 3.1.2 was aimed at some obvious issues that we could fix quickly and efficiently and in a couple of cases fixes that didn't make the release build.

As it stands right now, there's nothing in 3.1.2 that I would consider hot fix worthy. That includes the fleet manager issues. The Desync from custom UI mods in MP, etc.

They are annoying, but generally speaking the vast majority of players games right now are totally untouched by them, they will be addressed in our next release, but to get to that release without causing issues, we have to focus our attention on 3.2 without stop starting to make small patches.

Literally everyone I know that plays this game plays it modded, and we're all waiting for the desync bug to be patched to play multiplayer.

There are posts about it daily. This isn't affecting the majority of multiplayer games right now because we aren't playing. With a huge number of popular mods, this bug results in desyncs on day 1: of course no one is playing it.

 

[Serenity84]

I'll be open about this, there are no plans for a 3.1.3 right now.

So how this different from previous patch cycles where you rushed into the next iteration while leaving previous issues unfixed for months (or even years)?

There are some issues specifically with content added in Lem, such as civics not working correctly in all cases. Now in the grand scheme of things these might be small things, but in some ways it shows that little has changed.

 

[Arizal]

I really like the direction Stellaris' devs are pushing the development of Stellaris. It sounds like a careful, and constructive initiative. I just re-read the Unity & admin cap rework idea and it sounds like a very interesting proposal. I like how open and humble you are about it.

Stellaris definitely have a host of problems, from bad UI for sprawling empires to bad AI for late game, but I hope it can be the best it can be with time and care. A post some time ago by a player said Stellaris was thrown off track by numerous ambitious changes and ought to return to its source. Maybe. But building on that difficult infancy also seems a good idea.

As @Liggi just said, a roadmap on what the devs think they could bring us would be very appreciated.

 

[kaitsu]

Really hope AI improvements will also include updating the difficulty settings for the AI. Making the scaling difficulty more flexible, like being able to set scaling to start from Commodore difficulty rather than Cadet. I'm finding it hard to find a balance that enables some early game warmongering and that the AI would still give a good fight post mid game. Grand Admiral without scaling makes the early game mostly about just surviving and military civs perks are pretty useless until mid game.

I know there are some mods for AI scaling but to me they feel bit overwhelming. Playing just now with StarTech mod with Grand Admiral scaling on, early game has been so much fun and hoping it will stay interesting. Stellaris franchise has evolved nicely, sure bit rough patches here and there but I'm still excited what the future holds.

 

[exi123]

An open beta for a Stellaris patch? That would be a really interesting new approach to emvolve the community in development.

 

[Libertine Angel]

Sprawl is 100% an abstract game concept. It could be in the game, or it could not be in the game, but realism has nothing to do with it.

And I certainly understand sprawl: it's a welfare handout to so-called "tall" players, to disadvantage people who are actually playing a 4X game properly, instead of screwing around. (The argument there seems to be that Luxembourg and Monaco should be able to compete on the same footing with the United States and China. So much for "realism"!)

There's no such thing as playing "properly" in a sandbox game, the entire point of Stellaris is player freedom and choice. Real world geopolitics also doesn't apply to fictional sci-fi, in this case it's more apt to say that the Foundation should be able to hold its own against the declining Empire and its successors (which it did, a major point of the first book), or Hutt Space should be able to hold its own against the Galactic Republic (which it did), or Earth against the Covenant (which it did).

 

[Aexrael]

Any further hotfixes planned before 3.2?