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Stellaris Dev Diary #40 - Heinlein Patch (part 1)

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This is the first in a multi-part dev diary about the 'Heinlein' 1.3 patch that we are currently working on. As I mentioned in last week's dev diary, Heinlein will be a patch focusing on addressing community feedback, tentatively planned for release sometime in October. As such, you can expect a large number of interface and quality of life improvement, too many for me me to list here precisely what we have planned. However, we do also have some larger changes planned, and this dev diary is here to give you an overview of what to expect.

Auto-Explore
Exploration is an important part of the Stellaris early game, but towards the mid and late game, it can get annoying to have to manage your science ships while also trying to run a sprawling interstellar empire. We've said previously that we don't want the automation fully automated away, so the compromise we've settled on is to introduce a technology that will appear after your empire grows to a certain size that allows science ships to be automated (it will also grant some other bonuses so to be useful to the AI). Though we know that there are are people who want automation options from the very start, we believe that there is always a cost involved in automating core parts of the game experience. You will of course be able to mod the game to permit you to have it enabled from the start, if you so wish.

Rally Points
One of our most requested features since release has been a better way to manage newly built ships. After discussing the various options (such as a fleet designer) we decided to settle on adding Rally Points for your fleets. In Heinlein, you will be able to mark any planet or star in the galaxy as well as any warfleet owned by you as a rally point. When a new warship is built in your empire, instead of remaining at the planet that built it, it will look first for a fleet marked as a rally point. If it finds such a fleet, it will travel to that fleet and automatically merge with it. If something happens to destroy that fleet while the ship is traveling to it, it will abort and return back to its point of origin. If you have no fleet rally points, the ship will instead use the nearest planet rally point, traveling there and merging with any fleet present around that planet. In addition to changing how newly built ships behave, rally points also alter the 'return' order given to ships - instead of returning to the nearest spaceport, they will return to the nearest spaceport marked as a rally point. If no spaceport is marked as a rally point, they go to whichever one is closest, as before.

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Expansion Planner
Another highly requested feature that will be coming in Heinlein is an expansion planner - an interface where you can see planets that are available to colonize or build resource/observation stations at. It is currently planned to be a tab in your empire screen, where you can filter by what you are looking for and easily see the best candidate planet for whatever it is you are looking to do. More details on this will come in a future DD.

Strategic Resource Rework
An area of the game that we feel didn't really work out as planned is strategic resources. They are at once too rare and too common, too varied and too bland. Most of all, we feel that they are far too fiddly to interact with, requiring you to keep track in your head of which spaceports have which particular modules. As such, we currently have the following changes in mind for strategic resources:
- Split strategic resources into strategic (living metal, lythurgic gas, etc) and local (betharian stone, alien pets, etc) resources. Local resource will only be found on colonizeable planets and will allow you to build a specific building (such as a Betharian Power Plant) only on the tile where they are present.
- Add more types of local resources to colonizeable planets, making certain planets more desirable for that powerful special building you'll be able to build on it.
- Have strategic resources have clearly defined civilian OR military use, instead of each being a mix of both.
- Make their bonuses purely global, either via the construction of unique buildings or simply by providing a passive bonus.
- Require you to have only a single unit of a strategic resource to get its full benefits, so the excess can be traded away (terraforming resources will likely be an exception here).

That's all for today. Next week we'll continue talking about the Heinlein patch, specifically about the big rework coming in it: Fleet combat overhaul and dedicated ship roles. Note that as I said, there will be a *lot* of bug fixes, UI improvements and QoL changes coming in Heinlein, so I will not be able to answer every question about which exact ones will and will not make it, but if you have something you feel should be addressed for Heinlein (and it isn't a major feature addition/overhaul), feel free to mention it here.
 
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I can say this much on factions: I really don't like the current system and plan to majorly overhaul them in the future, but we won't do any major transformative changes with them for Heinlein, as there simply isn't time to do changes on that scale and get them working well. There will be *some* changes though, exactly what will be in another DD.
 
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@Wiz

Love what I'm reading. One question, if I may? I'm pretty terrified about the changes coming with strategic resources, considering AlphaMod's current reliance on already inflexible resource-chain function. Are the changes coming likely to make this even worse? Potentially, this could kill a mod like AlphaMod, already struggling with work-arounds, stone dead.
 
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Wiz said:
I can say this much on factions: I really don't like the current system and plan to majorly overhaul them in the future, but we won't do any major transformative changes with them for Heinlein, as there simply isn't time to do changes on that scale and get them working well. There will be *some* changes though, exactly what will be in another DD.
Click to expand...
This is a bigger disappointment. As mentioned earlier, I think this is very likely the most unique and potentially enjoyable system to Stellaris relative to other space 4Xs, and would clearly align with PDX strengths in grand strategy. Its a real shame this is on the indefinite backburner, and I think reflects either different priorities or different development resources than I originally assumed on the Stellaris team.

I won't bang on about how big a mistake I think it is to wait on realizing the potential of this feature, besides merely saying it here once and being done with the game until this is implemented.

Until then, best of luck!
 
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Please add a text box to Ship Builder to let us type a number when building ships. Having to click 100 times to build 100 corvettes is ridiculously annoying.
 
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AKicebear said:
This is a bigger disappointment. As mentioned earlier, I think this is very likely the most unique and potentially enjoyable system to Stellaris relative to other space 4Xs, and would clearly align with PDX strengths in grand strategy. Its a real shame this is on the indefinite backburner, and I think reflects either different priorities or different development resources than I originally assumed on the Stellaris team.

I won't bang on about how big a mistake I think it is to wait on realizing the potential of this feature, besides merely saying it here once and being done with the game until this is implemented.

Until then, best of luck!
Click to expand...

Ditto.
 
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AKicebear said:
This is a bigger disappointment. As mentioned earlier, I think this is very likely the most unique and potentially enjoyable system to Stellaris relative to other space 4Xs, and would clearly align with PDX strengths in grand strategy. Its a real shame this is on the indefinite backburner, and I think reflects either different priorities or different development resources than I originally assumed on the Stellaris team.

I won't bang on about how big a mistake I think it is to wait on realizing the potential of this feature, besides merely saying it here once and being done with the game until this is implemented.

Until then, best of luck!
Click to expand...

It is by no means on the indefinite backburner. I hope to get it in the next major patch after Heinlein, but I don't want to make any post-Heinlein promises at this stage.
 
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@Wiz

I'll be keeping an eye on things for sure. Stellaris has done well and has a lot of untapped potential I feel. If some compelling gameplay dynamics can be created at the intersections of multi-species empires, factions, sectors, ethics, and diplomacy I think that would make for a great mid-game experience. The basics are in place for this, but it needs some serious design thinking to get it firing on all cylinders.

My other big, "transformational" wish is that there be more interesting victory conditions coupled to your ethics / government type that help drive gameplay. I've assumed that the current victory conditions are sort of a place-holder. As is, the conquest-only victory only really makes sense for xeno-phobic militaristic types. Having interesting late-game victories, that are narrative / event-log based, for other combinations of ethics would really make the game sing and could make the late-game interesting too. Again, it would help drive-gameplay and would couple well with an enhanced faction system.
 
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Hey wiz,
Thanks for the information. I'm interested in seeing how the new resource system works out. Did y'all discuss having a system more like endless legends for resources?

For those who don't know, endless legends had resource mines which produce a set amount of resources every turn. You then can spend some of those resources on a unit, bonus, or take them to the market to trade. The market has fluctuating prices based on the demand for resources.

The big difference is that your tile continues to produce and you could theoretically focus your build on greater production of resources to become a trade power. The single use resource concept is simpler though.

It's always great to hear how you guys choose to design things. Thanks in advance.

Midas
 
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@Wiz Please tell me that the Federation Policies and Alliance Objectives are still a thing. These were the most anticipated thing in Heinlein for me (along with the mid-game events but you've already confirmed that they're in).
P.S: XL weapons?
 
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Wiz, are there any plans to make your empire feel a little less stale? For instance, some kind of cosmetic feature showing trade/passenger ships traveling from colony to colony?

Don't expect it in Heinlein, but Please look to distant worlds universe for inspiration on how to make our empires feel more alive.

Thanks
 
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Voldurak78 said:
@Wiz Please tell me that the Federation Policies and Alliance Objectives are still a thing. These were the most anticipated thing in Heinlein for me (along with the mid-game events but you've already confirmed that they're in).
P.S: XL weapons?
Click to expand...

XL weapon components, because we have four ship sizes but only three weapon sizes. XL slots will be on battleships.
 
I really like what I´m reading here...fleet overhaul sounds pretty amazing. October seems so far away, but more time could means better improvement process..and at least I have my new fanatic religious plantoid´s empire to play with.:cool:
 
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While this is a step in the right direction, it causes issues for anyone not deathballing. It would be better to be able to set rally points on a per-shipyard basis instead of globally. Also when returning for repairs, that is a case where we do actually want to go to the nearest in most cases. The ability to designate upgrade yards would be good, though, since those depend on having certain modules in place.
 
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