Stellaris Dev Diary #269 - Digging a Grave, and Galactic Matters

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What i would like to see beside that amazing new shapes are galaxys with more stars! Since hyper relays are a thing it feels 1000 stars are not enough anymore. Something like 2k or even 3k stars would be incredible cool.
I know of course that this could maybe come with some technical problems (at least modded bigger galaxys have those) but it's indeed quite high on my wish list.
An incredibly small subset of people can launch a 3k galaxy in under half an hour of loading.
 
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What i would like to see beside that amazing new shapes are galaxys with more stars! Since hyper relays are a thing it feels 1000 stars are not enough anymore. Something like 2k or even 3k stars would be incredible cool.
I know of course that this could maybe come with some technical problems (at least modded bigger galaxys have those) but it's indeed quite high on my wish list.
We actually considered it, but it turned out to be a fairly bad idea for several reasons. As Iggy said, we'd have to overhaul the galaxy generator to not take exponentially longer to create. There's also places in the code where there's an assumption that we won't have more than a certain number of solar systems, so we would likely end up encountering some crashes or interesting bugs. And then there's that the game has some core assumptions of the galaxy map being a certain physical size which proved very hard to disentangle (we didn't manage it for the time being). Finally, even if we overcame these challenges, adding say 50% more stars than Huge galaxies would have considerable performance implications, since even if we reduced the number of habitable planets, there'd still eventually be a lot of habitats, and pathfinding becomes considerably more complicated the more nodes are involved.
Are flags set against the different arms and any systems in the inter-arm space? To let us hook in to that at startup and tweak hyperlanes or systems around arm-chokepoints a bit further?

Checking if I understand this right, is this different from the system effects of (e.g.) black holes and neutron stars?

I don't think there is an easy way to apply effects to all ships (without using an aura/starbase) or colonies (without some looping scripts, or spawning in a nebula and editing the 'in_nebula' effects).

Separately, would it be possible to get an on action for ships leaving a system via a hyperlane? Right now there are onactions for entering a system via hyperlane or using bypasses but not for leaving via HL.
  • (Something like This system from fleet, from from destination)
  • it would open up a bit of space for playing with dynamic hyperlane speeds (rather than them all being 1-2 days travel time, leaving a black hole system might reduce interstellar (IS) speed by 90%, for example, if base IS speed was slowed down, leaving a neutron star could speed you up, and so on).
I don't think flags are set on them. It's basically like the current ring or spiral galaxies. Just combined.

As for the effect = { }, it lets you run a solar system scope effect on that system. Happens after it has been initialised. E.g. you could decide to spawn the Tiyanki Graveyard system, but in this particular static galaxy, you want to double the number of Tiyanki in it, and in this effect field you'd be able to do so.
I'd love more like this, gameplay first, style galaxies. This one looks great though obviously not very balanced for all empires but I don't think that is a big problem. Have some empires spawn locations set in the in the petals, others closer to the core.

Would it be possible to make "split" galaxies/areas which would not have direct hyperlane connections at start of the game? Eg. connected through wormholes or maybe some higher rank Hyperlane which would require mid or late game tech to access? Kind of like "alien grade" hyperlanes in David Weber/Steve White Starfire series based on Starfire board game if I remember right.
Not via random galaxies - it seems to always want systems connected in some way, which is probably a good thing, because it could be annoying if it randomly happened to you. But we can manually spawn systems (there's one off the edge of the galactic map in 3.5 which you should totally disturb). We can also manually delete hyperlanes. And in the static galaxies I mentioned, one can define manually where each star should spawn and where the hyperlanes should be between them, so this would be very possible there.
 
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Question: what are minimum galaxy sizes for each of these shapes?
Large for 6-arm spiral. Bar ("yingyang") galaxy works on tiny. 3-arm spiral works on small. The others need medium.
 
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