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Hi and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. Today we’re going to talk about some of the things we’re adding in the upcoming Kennedy update.

The Extradimensionals didn't work quite as we had imagined them. Players were more or less forced to throw everything they had at their dimensional portal, but there was no way to slowly push them back. The mechanics through which they received reinforcements also felt a bit too arbitrary, so we decided to shake things up a bit.

As before, the Unbidden care little for planets (aside from harvesting their populations). They are an entirely space-based civilization, but now they will also build a new class of station: Dimensional Anchors. These Anchors increase the ability of the Unbidden to bring in reinforcements from their portal. The more Anchors they have constructed, the shorter the time between their reinforcement waves. In addition to that, they will also bring in a new fleet from their portal every time an Anchor finishes construction.

As long as an Anchor is active, the Dimensional Portal will be indestructible.

Anchor.jpg


Anchors are very large stations, and they take a long time for the Unbidden to build. They also function as Frontier Outposts, in that they generate borders. If you see one under construction, you may want to consider a preemptive strike before it comes online…

Overall these changes mean that the Extradimensionals can no longer simply be defeated with a single surgical strike once they have had time to establish themselves in the galaxy, but also that they don’t get unlimited and instant reinforcements, so you can wear them down in a war of attrition.

Our illustrious Art Department has not been idle while we worked on these changes. They have added new death animations for all Extradimensional ships and stations:

ed_effect'.jpg


Extradimensional Constructors have also been given a new effect when they are building stations:

ED_construction_effect.png


We have also revisited the Precursor anomalies. It was much too difficult (sometimes impossible) to collect all six artifacts needed to finish their chains. As you approach the mid-game now, there is a chance that you will get a new event that spawns an additional anomaly somewhere inside your space.

lrCyMQI.png


That’s all for today! Next week we’ll be talking about new Achievements coming in the Kennedy update.
 
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Any chance the devs will be looking at the current Fallen Empire mechanics and the War in Heaven? I feel this needs a lot of work in order to be an enjoyable end game component.
 
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So far as I know, the Cybrex system spawns after you find the final anomaly. I know when I completed that chain, a new system spawned inside my borders (a very lucky coincidence given everyone else's stories!).

It could well be that you discovered a randomly generated ringworld that was unrelated to the Cybrex, as they do rarely appear.

A randomly generated system literally called "Cybrex" that also just happens to be a ringworld?
 
Looks really nice.

Is there a chance they'll show up even if no one has the drive in time? I'm rather tired of almost ever only seeing the Swarm.

On a related note, any chance there are plans to add more crises? Or at least make it so the AI rebellion can happen?

I'm *only* seeing the Unbidden. I think it's impossible to see anything else unless you disable Fallen Empires.

Edit: to clarify, at least 10 games in a row. Last time I saw the swarm was before 1.2.
Leviathans has only made it worse, since Awakened Empires use jump drive with abandon and presumably drive the counter through the roof.
 
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A randomly generated system literally called "Cybrex" that also just happens to be a ringworld?

I have seen the AI complete the Cybrex event chain as well. In a small galaxy. By Fanatic Spiritualist/Xenophobic Blorg. They had a system called Cybrex Alpha, that contained a broken ringworld, and the system was not there at the start of the game. (I didn't even have the Cybrex questline; I was on the Yuht questline. I did get 5/6 Yuht artifacts before the Prethoryn killed me though.)
 
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Thanks for all your work.

Alongside curator enclaves having unreadable auto-closing leviathan lore dialogue, the Unbidden were my biggest concern in the game although I had never run into one of their unbeatable 500k endlessly-reinforcing doomstacks myself. It's great to see some attention being given to them and maybe by the time I run into them I won't have to experience what's been giving others a lot of pain.
 
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"Longer intervals" don't really change the fundamental issue that the Unbidden have no infrastructure or economic limiations. You mention stations but the way the Ai works the Unbidden will end up spamming these new stations en masse. As AI has incredible good macro you will likely see them spam these stations with all their constructors all over the place. Anyone who tried to hunt down constructors and destroy all stations of the Unbidden should know what I mean.

Given how long it takes to rebuild a fleet, how high losses one can expect with the new combat system when engaging Unbidden fleets and that now one has to hunt down all of these stations which might not even show up on the map I'm somewhat worried this might only end up making Unbidden even less fun. You are fixing the "players sniping portal" without really addressing WHY they do this (it's the only way to deal with them).
 
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A very welcome change to the unbidden. It was rather annoying how their stations were the sole defining factor behind their expansion. Pushing them back to their system of entry seems like a welcome relief.

To be honest, what I'm hoping to see out of this update is a way to coordinate with the AI to improve the player's chances to defeat the unbidden. Ultimately, coordination is the only way a major threat can be defeated. Even the 101k fleets can be forgiven if that's made possible in single-player campaigns.
 
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"Longer intervals" don't really change the fundamental issue that the Unbidden have no infrastructure or economic limitations.

If you think the Unbidden don't have enough economic limitations, you should see the Prethoryn. They spawn new ships for free every two years, and completely ignore fleet capacity, up until a hard cap of 4711 individual ships. (Ship size doesn't matter, so they could stop spawning whether they have 4711 constructors or 4711 queens. No clue why 4711, but it's what's in the event files.) A typical Prethoryn Scourge has around 500,000 fleet power, whether they have two worlds or two hundred worlds, and the only way to cut off this stream of reinforcements is to destroy every single infested world. (You could technically kill all their starports too, but they rebuild them extremely quickly and destroying them gives you an opportunity to destroy the infested worlds, which don't get rebuilt.) At least with the Unbidden you can cut off their reinforcements by destroying their portals, which they only have a few of.

(Mercifully, the Prethoryn don't seem to rebuild their ground troops. If you kill all their armies, the Prethoryn fleets just wander through your systems blowing up stations and don't invade you. They can still rebuild the ships that infest uncolonized worlds though.)
 
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@Endless Rain Unbidden Fleets respawn almost immediatly when destroyed and slowly increase in numbers. It's one of the reasons why fighting them is so incredible pointless beyond sniping the portal. You could see this quite often when attacking the portal, you destroy a fleet defending it and it respawns almost right away at the portal. The same holds true for their contructors etc.

Even a small delay wont change much. Ship production times are actually pretty damn long. Even a max level shipyard with assembly yards tends to produce only 1 corvette per 30 days. Making 12 corvettes in a year. You could produce about 1.8 Battleships in a year. Which means that even if the Unbidden respawn their 100k stacks 5 or 10 years later they'd be outproducing you and they can sustain it indefinitely.
 
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All precursor events ending should give a unique/fun bonus.

A precursor Fallen-empire type ship
A precursor type building tech to build
A precursor type unique weapon
Or something like this.

Having these events end with just a dialogue is pretty bland :(
 
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Will there be any indicator of where and how many stations still exist? I could see this mechanic becoming extremely frustrating without that.

Yes, you will be able to see how many exist in the Situation Log. Since they are the only thing generating borders for the Extradimensionals now (aside from their portal), they won't be too difficult to find.
 
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I'm *only* seeing the Unbidden. I think it's impossible to see anything else unless you disable Fallen Empires.

Edit: to clarify, at least 10 games in a row. Last time I saw the swarm was before 1.2.
Leviathans has only made it worse, since Awakened Empires use jump drive with abandon and presumably drive the counter through the roof.
pre 1.3, I only ever saw the unbidden, never any of the other two crisis. Have only played one game in Heinlein, currently getting to the year 2500 and have had the AI crisis, which wasn't really much of a crisis.
I thought there was supposed to be the possibility of multiple crisis in Heinlein?
Other interesting things that happened was a FE awakened as early as 2305. :( Other FE awakened 60 years later to start the war in heaven, only to get instantly slaughtered by the first AFE as it had grown very powerful already... around 2490, I finally thought myself powerful enough and saw an opportunity to deal a blow against the AFE as it was involved in 3 other wars. So I attacked! It had 2x 1,000k and 1x 230k stacks. I jumped all my forces in (1300k) On top of one of its big stacks and my ships proved much stronger at point blank range so we sent the stack packing when it was down to 600k haveing only lost about 100k myself in the fight. The emergency warp saw it pair up with its other 1000k stack though :( Then that was pretty much all that happened in the war as I took system after system from the FE as its two monsterstacks just sat there and did nothing. The 230k stack tried to defend the capital system, and did decent damage to one of my 250k stacks as it warped in with range, but as soon as my reinforcements got in range it was quickly decimated obviously.
Was all in all a bit dissapointing that the AFE did such a poor job of defending itself.
 
pre 1.3, I only ever saw the unbidden, never any of the other two crisis. Have only played one game in Heinlein, currently getting to the year 2500 and have had the AI crisis, which wasn't really much of a crisis.
I thought there was supposed to be the possibility of multiple crisis in Heinlein?

This is a guess, depends on galaxy size logically I think? The swarm are not going to happen before people get to certain techs, which are either the AI crisis or the unbidden crisis in a galaxy with a lot of empires. That would make sense as explaining why people don't see the swarm as much on larger galaxies.

*No, no multiple crisis not unless you get the mod for it, at least that's what the consensus is. (1,2,3+,off) would make for a nice optional configuration.
 
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Sometimes, when I resarch -both- Sentient/Synthetic AI AND Jump Drive, I get the AI rebellion initial events, with robots doing weird stuff and smuggling their stuff away. But then the Unbidden or Praethoryn come and it leaves it all up in the air for the silly robots, unless I have that Unlimited Crisis mod. AI Rebellion crisis never really spawned for me otherwise.

"Robots are great and I'll let em finish, but the Unbidden are the GREATEST crisis OF ALL TIME!"

Crisis count not being limited to 1 by default would be interesting. Personally I won't be like: "Ah, it's the Praethoryn, guess we're out of the woods and I can resarch Jump Drive without fear!"
 
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Sometimes, when I resarch -both- Sentient/Synthetic AI AND Jump Drive, I get the AI rebellion initial events, with robots doing weird stuff and smuggling their stuff away. But then the Unbidden or Praethoryn come and it leaves it all up in the air for the silly robots, unless I have that Unlimited Crisis mod. AI Rebellion crisis never really spawned for me otherwise
The problem with this is that the AI revolt has a huge wind up time. It has loads and loads of minor incidents and things happening and long times inbetween before it goes down. Which given Jump Drives are just as fast and the Unbidden spawn immediatly ends up with the AI Rebellion never really kicking off. With the adjustment to tech in general, this means that even if you avoid Unbidden, the Scourge is likely to strike before the AI revolt has time to wind up.

An easy change would be to "lock you in", the moment the Revolt Chain starts for any empire. Rather than having these lenghty events that randomly happen over time and only when the proper revolt kicks off the other crises get deactivated. Because it means you will barely ever see the AI revolt even when actively trying for it.
 
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The problem with this is that the AI revolt has a huge wind up time. It has loads and loads of minor incidents and things happening and long times inbetween before it goes down. Which given Jump Drives are just as fast and the Unbidden spawn immediatly ends up with the AI Rebellion never really kicking off. With the adjustment to tech in general, this means that even if you avoid Unbidden, the Scourge is likely to strike before the AI revolt has time to wind up.

An easy change would be to "lock you in", the moment the Revolt Chain starts for any empire. Rather than having these lenghty events that randomly happen over time and only when the proper revolt kicks off the other crises get deactivated. Because it means you will barely ever see the AI revolt even when actively trying for it.

That's a great idea! And it doesn't sound like it would be hard to do, although I'm not a programmer.
 
That's a great idea! And it doesn't sound like it would be hard to do, although I'm not a programmer.
It isn't. All you have to do is set the flag galactic_crisis_happened (iirc) early in the AI revolt chain, and it stops both other crises from happening.
 
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