Stellaris Dev Diary #324 - 3.10.2 "Pyxis" Released [1cff] and December Plans

[Millbot]

Wonder if we'll get an idea of what 3.11 has in store later this week, or if we'll have to wait until next month.

Anyways, short list off the top of my head, on things I feel need a look.

-End game lag, pretty sure the two biggest sources are pops and then followed by ship numbers. Pretty some percent of the playerbase is going to pitch a fit on any change that is made and the devs are just going to have to accept that some players will leave. I'd also argue that a chunk of the players that will pitch a fit are being completely irrational because they dislike the idea of any sort of change, even if it makes part of the game accessible to them. It's not a matter of whether or not the change is for the better, they just refuse to accept the idea of change period.

-Warfare, this is one of two big systems that has yet to receive an overhaul, the other being internal politics. This one could encompass changes to overall ship amounts in the game. Anyways, I'm a bit surprised we haven't seen anything on this because I get the feeling that very few players are satisfied with the system at all and a vast majority end up finding warfare pretty tedious.

-Internal politics

-Overhaul of branch offices, big issue is that they have no synergy with planet designations. So megacorps are usually going to settle on 2-3 templates, with most megacorp builds using the same templates and there isn't much variation with the ones that do their templates slightly different because they switch out one holding for a civic specific holding. In a way it makes branch offices feel unrewarding on a certain level.

-Criminal megacorps aren't fun to play, nor fun to play against.

-Would like to see the idea of having more than one branch office on a world. Give megacorps another way to compete against each other, rather than on who can be the first to get an office up on all the worlds that can support one.

-Diplomacy tree rework. Have federations no longer locked into it. Also have a different diplomacy tree for megacorps that let's them hammer out commercial packs more easily..

-Some federation tweaks, make it so that there is less or no gaming to be had, by having your vassals in a federation. Would like to see them get holdings. Would also like to see them get a different interaction when the galactic empire is formed. Instead of being nuked, they get shifted to a new type of imperail org and that changes up some of their perks, with hegemony having to change into something that is less advantageous for the president. The emperor gets to be an honorary member of all such orgs, but never the president. Can choose to patronize one such org above the others, which gives those members bonuses. Fed fleets don't go away, but don't count towards the diplomatic weight of the org's president, but do add to the Emperor's clout, event hough they can't use them, and the emperor is giving some tools, where they can restrict how those fleets are used. Including one where they can remove the control an org's president has over the fleet, they wouldn't get control of that fleet, it would just behave similar to the GDF without a custodian, but it would cost the Emperor something both upfront and in upkeep.

-War In Heaven changes so that it doesn't ruin federations. Maybe if there if a GC, we get a coalition of the unaligned, which works similar to the GC, but excludes both FEs and imperial members. Can't remember if the GC goes back into effect when a galactic civil war happens or if it's just another fed, if the latter, it really should go back into effect as it's own separate thing.

-Vassals, they need another pass because right now they are too gamey. Two big issues are how they break federations and the galactic community, restricted voting should result in an empire having no diplomatic weight in a federation or GC. The other issue is that it's still possible to have swarms of them because loyalty doesn't matter enough. Easy fix to that would be to have tax evasion for disloyal subjects, so that high taxes can't just be a no brainer way to keep them from every being able to rebel. Disloyal subjects with high taxes will find ways to not pay and put those resources towards building what they need for a rebellion. Force overlords to either play nice, where they don't treat subjects like crap, by exploiting them, which means less resources for other things or if they treat them like crap, they will have to put a sizable amount of resources into having big enough fleets to keep them in check.

 

[Kamis51]

Wonder if we'll get an idea of what 3.11 has in store later this week, or if we'll have to wait until next month.

Anyways, short list off the top of my head, on things I feel need a look.

-End game lag, pretty sure the two biggest sources are pops and then followed by ship numbers. Pretty some percent of the playerbase is going to pitch a fit on any change that is made and the devs are just going to have to accept that some players will leave. I'd also argue that a chunk of the players that will pitch a fit are being completely irrational because they dislike the idea of any sort of change, even if it makes part of the game accessible to them. It's not a matter of whether or not the change is for the better, they just refuse to accept the idea of change period.

-Warfare, this is one of two big systems that has yet to receive an overhaul, the other being internal politics. This one could encompass changes to overall ship amounts in the game. Anyways, I'm a bit surprised we haven't seen anything on this because I get the feeling that very few players are satisfied with the system at all and a vast majority end up finding warfare pretty tedious.

-Internal politics

-Overhaul of branch offices, big issue is that they have no synergy with planet designations. So megacorps are usually going to settle on 2-3 templates, with most megacorp builds using the same templates and there isn't much variation with the ones that do their templates slightly different because they switch out one holding for a civic specific holding. In a way it makes branch offices feel unrewarding on a certain level.

-Criminal megacorps aren't fun to play, nor fun to play against.

-Would like to see the idea of having more than one branch office on a world. Give megacorps another way to compete against each other, rather than on who can be the first to get an office up on all the worlds that can support one.

-Diplomacy tree rework. Have federations no longer locked into it. Also have a different diplomacy tree for megacorps that let's them hammer out commercial packs more easily..

-Some federation tweaks, make it so that there is less or no gaming to be had, by having your vassals in a federation. Would like to see them get holdings. Would also like to see them get a different interaction when the galactic empire is formed. Instead of being nuked, they get shifted to a new type of imperail org and that changes up some of their perks, with hegemony having to change into something that is less advantageous for the president. The emperor gets to be an honorary member of all such orgs, but never the president. Can choose to patronize one such org above the others, which gives those members bonuses. Fed fleets don't go away, but don't count towards the diplomatic weight of the org's president, but do add to the Emperor's clout, event hough they can't use them, and the emperor is giving some tools, where they can restrict how those fleets are used. Including one where they can remove the control an org's president has over the fleet, they wouldn't get control of that fleet, it would just behave similar to the GDF without a custodian, but it would cost the Emperor something both upfront and in upkeep.

-War In Heaven changes so that it doesn't ruin federations. Maybe if there if a GC, we get a coalition of the unaligned, which works similar to the GC, but excludes both FEs and imperial members. Can't remember if the GC goes back into effect when a galactic civil war happens or if it's just another fed, if the latter, it really should go back into effect as it's own separate thing.

-Vassals, they need another pass because right now they are too gamey. Two big issues are how they break federations and the galactic community, restricted voting should result in an empire having no diplomatic weight in a federation or GC. The other issue is that it's still possible to have swarms of them because loyalty doesn't matter enough. Easy fix to that would be to have tax evasion for disloyal subjects, so that high taxes can't just be a no brainer way to keep them from every being able to rebel. Disloyal subjects with high taxes will find ways to not pay and put those resources towards building what they need for a rebellion. Force overlords to either play nice, where they don't treat subjects like crap, by exploiting them, which means less resources for other things or if they treat them like crap, they will have to put a sizable amount of resources into having big enough fleets to keep them in check.

"-Vassals, they need another pass because right now they are too gamey. Two big issues are how they break federations and the galactic community, restricted voting should result in an empire having no diplomatic weight in a federation or GC. The other issue is that it's still possible to have swarms of them because loyalty doesn't matter enough. Easy fix to that would be to have tax evasion for disloyal subjects, so that high taxes can't just be a no brainer way to keep them from every being able to rebel. Disloyal subjects with high taxes will find ways to not pay and put those resources towards building what they need for a rebellion. Force overlords to either play nice, where they don't treat subjects like crap, by exploiting them, which means less resources for other things or if they treat them like crap, they will have to put a sizable amount of resources into having big enough fleets to keep them in check. "

Big Yes for above

 

[Maulin301]

Are you planning to add the ability for us to reorder our fleets in the outliner like the planets? That would be very helpful.

 

[Kavidar]

Did leaders get an increased chance to pick up negative traits as part of any of the 3.10 patches, or am I just getting really unlucky on my current run? I am 43 years into the game and I have 8 negative traits spread around my current 9 leaders. and I have fired 2 leaders and replaced them for getting unmanageable negative traits as well.

 

[Gabarius]

Are you planning to add the ability for us to reorder our fleets in the outliner like the planets? That would be very helpful.

Seconded. It would be really really great if we could have this feature as part of the outliner rework - if not for 3.10.3, then for 3.11.

 

[Calvax]

"-Vassals, they need another pass because right now they are too gamey. Two big issues are how they break federations and the galactic community, restricted voting should result in an empire having no diplomatic weight in a federation or GC. The other issue is that it's still possible to have swarms of them because loyalty doesn't matter enough. Easy fix to that would be to have tax evasion for disloyal subjects, so that high taxes can't just be a no brainer way to keep them from every being able to rebel. Disloyal subjects with high taxes will find ways to not pay and put those resources towards building what they need for a rebellion. Force overlords to either play nice, where they don't treat subjects like crap, by exploiting them, which means less resources for other things or if they treat them like crap, they will have to put a sizable amount of resources into having big enough fleets to keep them in check. "

Big Yes for above

+2. Maybe I've been unlucky but I can't remember ever seeing a vassal rebellion, let alone a multi vassal rebellion. Even if all those vassals could take the overlord. What seems more common is that vassals end up having internal rebellions because taxes are destroying their economy.

Also a small UI tweak to better differentiate vassals and fed members on the map would be great.

 

[Uberlator]

Absolutely LOVE outliner customizability!! Thank you so much for the quick update. I would love the ability to custom order military fleets too, but this is real nice.

 

[Terran91]

+2. Maybe I've been unlucky but I can't remember ever seeing a vassal rebellion, let alone a multi vassal rebellion. Even if all those vassals could take the overlord. What seems more common is that vassals end up having internal rebellions because taxes are destroying their economy.

Also a small UI tweak to better differentiate vassals and fed members on the map would be great.

I saw, more than once. Against me and against NPC. I suppose it depends on the cumulative comparative power, because all these examples were only against empires with the same power by all 3 parameters.

 

[Muhrks]

Would we be able to change the outlinertab-names and icons in the future? =)

 

[Shark7]

I personally think an economy rebalancing is in order.

And even though it may be very unpopular, it may be time to reign in all the sources of bonuses (IE traits...looking at you leaders) and modifiers that are applied to the various economic systems in game. I just think there are too many modifiers and that is what eventually leads to the late game power creep problems. Some modifiers to make empires diverse is a good thing. But I think having too many modifiers is causing a lot of the problems that players complain about regularly.

Sometimes simpler is better. Just my opinion.

 

[Soranya]

really hoping balance includes work on weapons.. so many weapons are terrible currently especially anything with -75% penalties on them looks at autocannons and event weapons especially... event weapons need some love and 'unique' traits.. feel free too read my suggestions in my banner on that topic

So we have come full round on Autocannons - from under powered to medicore to overpowered and back to unterpowered again?
Hell, combat needs a complete rewrite, not a redesign, or adjustments - complete bottom up rewrite from the scratch. ;(

 

[XCodes]

Would be nice to get an economic rebalance to compensate for the powercreep, as every dlc and feature just adds to it.
Higher cost for stuff, higher tier techs, ships, upkeep etc. (about tech tiers there was a topic, briefly low level techs take relatively too long to research (5-10 years), especially at increased tech/trad cost, but as snowballing is ongoing later level techs are finished in matter of months.)
Besides tech cost slider we might need a general cost slider maybe. I'd even appreciate a starbase influence cost slider too to have a really slow paced game.

While this is somewhat true, it's also somewhat not true. Tech got notably nerfed in 3.10(.1) when Officials lost their old bonus to tech production and Scientists have go govern a planet to significanly less effect than the old Assist Research option. Nerfs to trade and factions also significantly reduced how easy it is to cruise on free unity all the way through Ascension, to say nothing of the AP's getting forced to 3rd pick (where they directly compete with Arcology Project).

I do think there should be more changes to tech, though, including more tech tiers. It'll slow down effective accumulation and also help deal with the bloated first couple tech tiers.

 

[Troyen]

-Warfare, this is one of two big systems that has yet to receive an overhaul, the other being internal politics. This one could encompass changes to overall ship amounts in the game. Anyways, I'm a bit surprised we haven't seen anything on this because I get the feeling that very few players are satisfied with the system at all and a vast majority end up finding warfare pretty tedious.

Remember that people who are fine with the way things are rarely have an incentive to express that opinion. I think warfare itself is (mostly) fine, outside of needing some improvements to handle three-way wars where the current system can lead to stalemates. It's also nice that internal politics aren't a big factor in this game because the space setting allows for a focus on exploring and managing the external for once, whereas every other PDX game is more tailored to handle the internal.

 

[nweismuller]

As far as veteran classes thin on destiny traits, the Advisor currently only has one- might be worth adding one or two.

 

[Deadles]

And After That?

The 3.11 "Eridanus" update in 2024Q1 will focus on stability, AI, and balance.

We're planning on running a balance related Open Beta over the holidays to collect feedback regarding some experiments around Research.

Will there also be improvements to the performance?

 

[klingonadmiral]

I hope for a strike craft nerf.

 

[Merch991]

I'll bookmark this list and look at it once I'm done bugfixing for 3.10.x

I'm also really hoping for a balance pass over:

- Military Ship Build cost and Upkeep reductions
(Currently there are too many too big modifiers which make too easy to obtain absurd amount of ships at actually no cost. Thinking in particular about Supremacy Traditions and Councilors Traits)

- Naval Capacity boni
(Same as above: too many ways to increase it to ridiculous amounts)

- Magnitude of economic modifiers
(Again, it's too easy to stack absurd amounts of basically all resources output, expecially for Technicians/Miners/Farmers. I think that's not really intended that you can stack around +150%/+200% output for those resources at about the early-to-mid game. Turning them into throughput, as @Tannhäuser Cake said is a good start but magnitude is an important factor as well)

- Static Defense and Eternal Vigilance AP
(I really hope that all of these receive substantial buffs because they are becoming useless again)

- Stability, Happiness and Crime
(I know that Stability is not on the list but let's face it, it's too easy to have 100 Stability no matter what kind of Empire you play and it's not entirely fault of the new, utterly broken Martial Law, which should be fixed ASAP.
Those parameters should be a bit more difficult and interesting to manage but currently it's just throwing down a building or a Leader, researching a thing et voilà, 100 happiness, 100 stability amd 0 crime everywhere! Clearly not intended.
A good start is to remove/rewrite the Festival Of Worlds and rebalance happiness from living standards, as well as reducing the amount of crime suppressed by a single enforcer, which actually make them counterintuitively useless as you need 1, max 2 per planet)

 

[Harvey_James]

so i noticed there are missile, carrier, small weapon and artillery buff traits.. is there any for energy weapons? or others? .. instead of offering fleet command or naval capacity traits both are bad for the game and even in a game in long term if u rely on them and then they are taken away much like the reason u removed the bonus to nav cap for the admiral role... focus on bonuses that actually improve the fleet the admiral is controlling or if council something too improve costs/build speed/logistics etc..

 

[fourteenfour]

Did leaders get an increased chance to pick up negative traits as part of any of the 3.10 patches, or am I just getting really unlucky on my current run? I am 43 years into the game and I have 8 negative traits spread around my current 9 leaders. and I have fired 2 leaders and replaced them for getting unmanageable negative traits as well.

I posted on the other patch thread but my entire council in more than one game had negative traits and unless I am playing a gestalt empire my only option is to keep firing leaders except of course the elected leader who I am stuck with. Worse, once a leader has a negative trait any positive version of the trait you try to apply is immediately lost. To make it even worse the negative traits are just worse than any positive version and I swear I get more negative traits after I go down the Aptitude tree.

I did notice that you cannot reload the game to circumvent a negative trait. either the negative trait slot is determined when the leader is hired or some internal process is already set to apply a negative trait. The same leader always gets their negative trait. I have no issue with negative traits on legendary leaders - the old with great power comes great risk - but on regular leaders it just means I replace them instantly because the effects are too high. My worry is the dev team will just make it so that it costs too much to fire leaders or worse make it to where we cannot.



However since I do not play with mods I just started removing the negative traits through the console. I just got tired of every damn leader having a negative trait, real fun when the council has more than one negative research speed trait. Something is clearly wrong.

So for console, once debugtooltip is active you can hover over the leader portrait in the leader screen (F5) to get their id and then hover over the negative trait to get the name for the remove command

1. debugtooltip <- this lets you get the leader id and negative trait name
2. remove_trait_leader leaderid leader_trait_badtrait

 

[Soranya]

- Stability, Happiness and Crime
(I know that Stability is not on the list but let's face it, it's too easy to have 100 Stability no matter what kind of Empire you play and it's not entirely fault of the new, utterly broken Martial Law, which should be fixed ASAP.
Those parameters should be a bit more difficult and interesting to manage but currently it's just throwing down a building or a Leader, researching a thing et voilà, 100 happiness, 100 stability amd 0 crime everywhere! Clearly not intended.
A good start is to remove/rewrite the Festival Of Worlds and rebalance happiness from living standards, as well as reducing the amount of crime suppressed by a single enforcer, which actually make them counterintuitively useless as you need 1, max 2 per planet)

When tinkering with Crime then they have to adjust the crime event spawn - if i can do nothing about it i dont need all those events telling me crims is rampant. Events should be something you care about when they happen not just move around a few modifiers. - and currently I have the feeling either you reduce the crime to 0 asap or it will go rampant and you will have to martial law/full enforce the planet until crime is at 0 again and all pop up modifiers are gone. Which is not fun game play wise (everything that forces you to temporarily redisng a planet is anoying b.c. there is no way of saving the original layout to go back to.