Stellaris Dev Diary #276 - Death is the Beginning

[PDS_Iggy]

Greetings, ghouls and ghasts! Chief Reanimator Iggy here to report the most recent innovation in the field of necromancy. With the 3.6 update, we will bring you the Cordyceptic Drones civic! These delightful fungi will allow you to dominate the galaxy with zombie space fauna, as this is the third Reanimation civic! I know many of you have been enjoying this on the Beta, but if you give me a moment, I will have something new to show you!


Cordyceptic Drones

If you have been following how I made Permanent Employment, you would know that I want all these different reanimation civics to have access to the Leviathan Reanimation feature while still having unique gameplay. Cordyceptics follow this trend giving hives a much more biological reanimation method.

Also including the new Hivemind Government Type Parasitic Overmind!​

The civic can be incredibly powerful based on the space fauna you encounter. If you find Tiyana Vek early game, then you are in for a fun game while you have to restructure your entire economy to produce enough food to keep your dread fleet flying. Yet that is not all! Cordyceptic Empires are masters of all things biological, so your Amoeba Flagella will now be a force to be reckoned with in the early game. And if you happen to get the Prethoryn as your crisis, you might be able to use those missiles better than the Prethoryn themselves!

Now, who would want to start with some boring old Corvettes?​

As a final little flavor feature for you, I present you with the Cordyceptic Reanimation Facility, capable of resurrecting space fauna continuously for a food upkeep! However, it requires that you find systems rich in organic life.

A new Tiyanki fleet is ready to be deployed!​

The Other Thing

Back when Eladrin and I first introduced Reanimatable Leviathans for 3.1 “Lem” there was one piece of feedback we kept hearing internally. Will the Leviathans look like Zombies? While we couldn't deliver it back then. After much finagling, bartering, and pledging my soul to our Art Director, we are here to bring you Reanimated Leviathans as you have never seen them before.

Someone call in the Fire Department ‘cos it’s SMOKING in here!​

This collaboration required the cooperation of each discipline within our art team, with beautiful concept art, new shaders, and breathtaking VFX!

What is Next for Reanimators?

Machines will repurpose dead organic matter.
Eventually…
Now go out and raise some dead!

 

[PDS_Iggy]

Could empires with these "reanimator" civics get diferent flavor for some relevant events?

We try to give them unique flavor in events where it would be thematic, like the Titanic Skeleton or the Rock Brain!

Spoiler for the machine version of the civic?

 

[PDS_Iggy]

@PDS_Iggy
I love this, and yet I don't think you've taken it far enough! The major issue with the organic fleets is the sublight speed. The undead tiyanki and ameoba are just too slow. The speed of those creatures should be buffed by at least 50%. I think this civic should be like barbaric despoilers and not be removable after the game start. In addition, it would be great if instead of shipyards, you had nurseries, and could train various tiyanki & amoeba after encountering them and trainable using food. It would be great to have this be a full overhaul making it a truly unique playstyle. This would also mean the hive could not produce regular ships, and instead would research only technologies that would buff fauna weapons. Not having shields and being limited to fauna weapons would be very cool. Instead of building a juggernaut, building a Grand Dragon or Voidspawn would be amazing.

All in all this is a great start, that could be taken so much farther to add much more depth to the game. Please consider it, thanks!

Something I have learned here is keeping the scope of a feature confined to itself. What you are describing would be more relevant for an Origin that probably would headline a DLC, not a civic being added years after release. If you look at something like Necrophages it actually reaches too far into too many fantasies. It makes it harder to make vampires, parasites, zombies, and more content. I would rather leave the full "you can build organic ships" to whenever I finally manage to convince the team to make an organic ship set.

However, I do agree that we should probably speed up the reanimated fleets.

 

[PDS_Iggy]

Thanks for the response. I think you could avoid adding a new organic shipset if you allowed the player to build the different Amoeba & Tiyanki that already exist. The other thing that would be a minor tweak would be allowing repeatable tech to buff the associated relevant fauna weapons as well. I.E. Strike Craft repeatables buff Amoeba Strike Craft? Armor repeatables buff armor for Organics and so on? Eitherway, its a really cool civic and I've enjoyed playing it so far.

But I want an organic ship set!