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Stellaris Dev Diary #55 - Unity and Traditions

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today we'll be talking about a new feature coming in the 1.5 'Banks' update called Traditions and Unity. As before, I can't talk about when Banks will be coming out, only that it's a while away and we have quite a few dev diaries to go through before we get there :)

Traditions and Unity
One thing we have mentioned as a big priority for Stellaris is adding more empire customization and more ability to roleplay diverse empires. We have also talked about our desire to allow for the existance of 'tall' empires. Traditions and Unity is a feature that aims to tackle both these topics by adding 7 new Tradition trees and a resource called Unity that is used to unlock them. Unity is an accumulative resource that increases each month, and is primarily gained through the construction of government buildings such as monuments, mausoleums and temples. Unity is spent on adopting Tradition trees and purchasing individual Traditions. Each Tradition tree has a starter bonus, five unlockable bonuses and a finisher bonus that is gained once the entire tree is filled out.
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The seven Tradition trees are as follows:
Expansion: Focuses on growth through rapid colonization.
Domination: Focuses on maintaining control over your population and subjects.
Prosperity: Focuses on economic growth.
Harmony: Focuses on maintaining a happy and diverse population.
Supremacy: Focuses on growth through military conquest.
Purity: Focuses on strength through homogenity and dominion over other species.
Exploration: Focuses on exploration and scientific discovery.
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The cost of unlocking a Tradition depends on the size of your empire, as well as how internally stable it is. Unhappy factions, minority species and slaves all increase the cost of adoption Traditions further, though these effects can be offset or even canceled out entirely by adopting the right Traditions for the empire you intend to build. Overall, small harmonious empires will unlock Traditions more quickly than large, expansionistic ones. Which Traditions you unlock also has a significant impact on the ethics of your population, and so can be a useful tool to either strengthen your existing empire ethics or further a planned empire-wide shift towards a different set of ethics altogether.

You may have noticed a certain part of the Traditions screen that I have not yet mentioned in this dev diary. That's because it's actually the subject of the next dev diary! However, since the Christmas holidays are coming up, most of the Stellaris team will be away, so dev diaries will be on hiatus until January 12th. Tune back in then to find out all about the Ascension Perks and how you can use them to build the empire of your dreams.
 
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Yep Civ V was a fun game ;)

Hopefully there will be a limitation of some sort as I'd hate to see late game empires maxing out all or most of the trees every game. Hopefully the tradition acquisition cost will scale sufficiently (to make up for the empire growth) too since 2 points per month for one building when the cost is 40 per tradition is faster than alot of the techs you can research. Here's hoping we don't end up with the optimal strategy of making planets that are literally mausoleums, monuments and government buildings all over :D
 
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Hi @Wiz

Can you say if Banks will include more ways to interact diplomatically or not? "Flesh Tithe" says that it will let you demand slaves from subjects ... But I'd like to know if you're considering enabling us to enforce policy changes on vassals or allow them to colonise ... that sort of thing. Currently subjects are quite limited, so I hope this is something you're looking to expand on.

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@Wiz

Will any of the traditions lock out other traditions? I couldn't imagine Harmony and Purity working together for example (outside of Beyond Earth that is!)

Good news though, I was wondering if Banks would be bringing anything like this. I'm assuming it's going through rigourious testing and balancing - my only concern is in Long games that people could max out all trees, it there anything in place for dealing with this (other than the growth penalties?) I know I end up with all the techs by the end of a long game despite growth penalties.
 
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Well, since Civ 6 now has casus belli I don't see why not :)

Civ: Beyond Earth introduced Paradox-style War Score, Civ 6 introduced CBs, EU4 announced this week that they'll bring Endless Legend's "Legendary Deeds" (era-specific challenges giving certain bonuses) feature to EU4, and now Stellaris is getting Civ 5's Social Policies. There's definitely a lot of cross-pollination going on between 4X and Grand Strategy nowadays.
 
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Excelent update! Will tradition impact the AI behaviour? (f.e. taking malevolent ideas from purity/domination escalating hatred from other empires?)
 
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Will this tall traditions somehow keep your 250k fleet neighbor from coming over and punching you in the face with invitation to vassalize?
 
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@Wiz

Will any of the traditions lock out other traditions? I couldn't imagine Harmony and Purity working together for example (outside of Beyond Earth that is!)

Good news though, I was wondering if Banks would be bringing anything like this. I'm assuming it's going through rigourious testing and balancing - my only concern is in Long games that people could max out all trees, it there anything in place for dealing with this (other than the growth penalties?) I know I end up with all the techs by the end of a long game despite growth penalties.
The traditions are specifically tied to ethos- "taking all of them" means taking all the ones diametrically opposed to your population's interests, meaning they'll be really angry.
 
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Why not? Have two races work tirelessly on exterminating other species. Like a crusade, where lots of countries united for a single goal.
Im imagining "Mammalian superiority" instead of "Human superiority" when considering Harmony and Purity.
 
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Yep Civ V was a fun game ;)

Hopefully there will be a limitation of some sort as I'd hate to see late game empires maxing out all or most of the trees every game. Hopefully the tradition acquisition cost will scale sufficiently (to make up for the empire growth) too since 2 points per month for one building when the cost is 40 per tradition is faster than alot of the techs you can research. Here's hoping we don't end up with the optimal strategy of making planets that are literally mausoleums, monuments and government buildings all over :D
Isaac Asimov would like to have a word with you on planets covered in government buildings.
 
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Here's hoping we don't end up with the optimal strategy of making planets that are literally mausoleums, monuments and government buildings all over :D
Funny, because the first thing my mind went to was that it'd be really neat if the mechanic encouraged you to redevelop your homeworld into a proper "bureaucratic hub" with all your tombs and ministries and such on it.
 
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Not pure. PURGE!


LOL!

"Pittyfull plant subcreature. Bow before superior animal masterrace"
Shame there are still creature like this. They forget or even actively deny the great purge of 2354 when they got their populations to throw millions of reptilian and arachnid eggs at targets for sport, and they forced birds to strip off their feathers.
 
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Another hiatus? It almost makes me want to move to Sweden.

The last one wasn't because of vacations, it was because we couldn't talk about 1.5 until 1.4 was out. It's really just unfortunate timing that you get two long hiatuses so close together.
 
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You may be shocked to find out that there are other features in Stellaris 'ripped off' from other games, for example colony ships. ;)

(The mechanics of Traditions differ from those of social policies, especially where Ascension Perks are involved, but I can understand thinking so from the interface)

Mostly its the Adopt, 5 policies and a Finisher than makes it look like a civ 5 rip off. Can't wait for a mod which ups it to 7 or 10 policies in each tree.
 
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Awesome feature. The social policy trees were one of my favorite parts of CiV and I'm glad you guys are adopting the same sort of idea. I have a couple of thoughts though. Firstly, I feel like the harmony and purity tree contradict each other. One promotes a diverse and happy population while the other promotes species domination. Obviously we can't read the tradition descriptions right now, but if they're not going to be exclusive please try to make it so that the descriptions from one don't contradict the descriptions from the other.

On that note, the only thing I am kind of disappointed in is the lack of exclusivity. I'm not sure how long it takes to adopt one complete tree so maybe the fact that there are only five traditions per tree are alright, but the fact you can adopt every tree sort of irks me. Because of that, the choice of which tradition to adopt is only short-term. We can always grab the other option later and, if we play long enough, eventually we will adopt all the traditions. I hope that in the future we can make more difficult choices when customizing our empires.

Other than those two gripes, this is probably going be my most favorite feature so far.

One last thing: is this blank area going to be used to display the finisher? If not, it seems like wasted space.

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