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Stellaris Dev Diary #69: Beyond Utopia

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is going to briefly cover our plans for future Stellaris updates, and what you can expect from us going forward.

The Adams Update
With Utopia and Banks now out, the next thing we have planned for you is the 1.6 'Adams' update. This update, named after Douglas Adams, is going to focus completely on bug fixing and quality of life changes, with no major feature additions and no accompanying paid DLC. Work on 1.6 actually started almost immediately after Banks/Utopia went into code freeze, and it already contains hundreds of bug fixes and usability/UI additions and tweaks. A particular focus of Adams has been to work on our backlog of old issues, taking care of many of the smaller issues and annoyances that have been present in the game since release. We've also made time for some of the things that were originally planned for Banks, but had to be cut due to time constraints. While I can't give you an exact release date for Adams yet, I can say that you shouldn't have to wait too long.

Beyond Utopia
Back in Dev Diary #50, I listed a number of priorities for us going forward from Heinlein/Leviathans. A number of these things have since been added to the game, so I'm going to go ahead and list it again to give you an idea of where our focus will lie in future updates, expansions and story packs, with the items that are already completed noted with a strikethrough. The list is NOT in order of priority, and something being crossed out does NOT mean we aren't going to continue to improve on it in future updates, just that we consider it to be at a satisfactory level.

As before, THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE OR FINAL LIST, AND NOTHING BELOW IS CERTAIN TO HAPPEN (unless it already did)!
  • Ship appearance that differs for each empire, so no two empires' ships look exactly the same.
  • More potential for empire customization, ability to build competitive 'tall' empires.
  • Global food that can be shared between planets.
  • Ability to construct space habitats and ringworlds.
  • Factions that are proper interest groups with specific likes and dislikes and the potential to be a benefit to an empire instead of just being rebels.
  • Ability to set rights and obligations for particular species in your empire.
  • Deeper Federations that start out as loose alliances and can eventually be turned into single states through diplomatic manuevering.
  • Superweapons and planet killers.
  • More story events and reactive narratives that give a sense of an unfolding story as you play.
  • More interesting mechanics for pre-FTL civilizations.
  • A 'galactic community' with interstellar politics and a 'space UN'.
  • Buildable Dreadnoughts and Titans.
  • Reworking the endgame crises to be more balanced against each other and the size/state of the galaxy.
  • Reworks to war to address the 'doomstacks' issue and make the strategic and tactical layers of warfare more interesting and less micro-intensive.
  • Deeper mechanics and unique portraits for synthetics.

With Utopia and Banks, we decided that rather than divide our focus, it was better to have the update and expansion focus almost exclusively on empire customization and internal politics, and this is the policy we intend to continue with for future expansions. As always, I can't tell you specifically what the next expansion, update or story pack is going to be about, but the above list should at least give you some ideas of where you can expect Stellaris to go in the future.

That's all for today! Next week we'll start going into specifics of the 1.6 'Adams' update so until then, I leave you with this picture of some of the free graphical content coming in Adams:
2017_04_20_1.png
 
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So that list, is that like in the "to-do" order of priority or unsorted? Because I'd like to see this...
  • Reworks to war to address the 'doomstacks' issue and make the strategic and tactical layers of warfare more interesting and less micro-intensive.
... Like, way, way before some of those other features.

Yeah, I have too agree with this. The main issue IMO is that Spaceports ( and to lesser degree fortress/defenses ) don't scale in defensive powers at all so they become roadkills later in the game, and that there is very little in terms of logistics or harassment of supplylines ( which should be the main weapons against putting everything in a single doomstack ).
 
Nice, looking forward to more protraits for synths and more events.

Speaking of graphical improvements, I hope there are plans for more cosmetic DLC. I'd love to see more aquarian species and overall more diverse aliens.
 
wiz you are my utopia <3
 
A lot of core mechanics need to be adjusted to Utopia realities as they don't really make sense with new mechanics. Let's take F.Purifiers as example -
They works toward eradicating every xenos out there but they still need xenos planets and POPs for naval capacity and border range (no matter how you try even with super border range you cannot play as FP with outposts only).
Even if all xenos POPs are put on auto-purge, PF still pay penalty for science for each POP and planet.
Unrest cause by purging POPs affect PF POPs on the same planet and can easily outlive the last xeno POP for decades.
PF don't really fit into any ascension path - be it Bio, Synth or Psy, due to tech limitation, policies, faction. And it apply to whole lot other ethics combinations.

Whose thing above fall in "QoL improvements" or we have to wait till after Adams for changes?
 
Reworks to war to address the 'doomstacks' issue and make the strategic and tactical layers of warfare more interesting and less micro-intensive.

This would like to see sooner then later and a ground combat/defense station rework. would be nice to have plant orbitals and ground builds that can defend a plant.
I was thing what if a simple supply system was add that had a radius range from plants and supply stations. your ships are fine as long you with in your supply range but as soon as you go out side it you take attrition or some negative modifier for being out side your supply range. can make you supply ranger bigger with techs and building forward supply bases.
 
Looking forward to more great stuff from you, but (and not a complaint) this
  • More story events and reactive narratives that give a sense of an unfolding story as you play.
Should never be crossed out. :)

That's the part of the game that received the most care since the beginning of the game, so I would not fear anything about that. I'm more worried with the addition of new mechanics that feel unfinished, like factions (which sounded really cool, but do nothing more than centralizing happiness and providing influence) or traditions (which are, to say the least, quite bland).

If they take the same approach for expanding the combat system or galactic interactions I can already prepare myself to be disappointed... I really fear that Stellaris will stay a cool Star Trek episode generator in which you can build and fight enormous things. I hoped it would become a complex space opera simulator. I mean, Death Stars are cool, but so far the game failed at providing THAT feeling of evolving in an alien galaxy in which my decisions matter. And not just "oh, my neighbour is labelled inferior, I will attack him".
 
PF don't really fit into any ascension path - be it Bio, Synth or Psy, due to tech limitation, policies, faction.
They do not mind doing genemod ascension at all. Faction restricts you to have different subspecies. If you just genemod your primary race leaving no one behind, they will be happy.

Same with synthetic ascension, it's doable for FP.
 
Suggestion: transport fleet should remember it's stance ("passive", "evasive") after landing on a planet and embarking back into space.
90% of my ground troops losses is from passive transport fleets orbiting recently captured enemy planets.
 
I'm surprised not to see some form of trade system explicitly mentioned on that list.
 
They do not mind doing genemod ascension at all. Faction restricts you to have different subspecies. If you just genemod your primary race leaving no one behind, they will be happy.

Same with synthetic ascension, it's doable for FP.

I didn't say it isn't doable. I say it didn't really fit gameplay-wise, and "lore-wise". To begin with genemoding really imply that you're supposed tweak species differently it different places. But with PF you have to do it at once (and if you mess it up - like with colony ships, you're in trouble). Not only it severely reduce the benefits of this method, it cost a huge amount of Science to do so. Not to mention that Bio-paths techs can cause a havoc in xenophobe empire.
For a synth path - it does feel like something PF would do, but policies related to synth and their rights (or, i must say, an inability to differentiate between homemade and xeno synths) is a major roadblock here.
 
I'm no game designer, but I hope they have something planned for the army system to make it more fun. If not 1.6, then in the future. Can't wait for upcoming diaries!
 
Combat likely requires a entire update devited to it.

Small issues that irk me at the moment and I hoope will get fixed:

- A lot of triggers depend on scanning planets and when you exchange star charts you lose this trigger which can screw up things. (Precursor chain). Getting star charts curtently is a very bad thing to do, also because of the Survey Corps tradition. The entire systen behind anomalies needs to be overhauled imo (ok, thats a big change)

- Ascension not affecting all pops (by not giving all pops the latent psionic trait for example) which causes species splintering.

- That there is no distinction between a genemodded species and a completely different one. Imo the species list should be a tree with the original species on top and all subspecies under it. That way you could have effects which affect all subspecies too as they are tracked and have different rules and modifiers for otger soecies and member of a subspecies.

- Unrest is much too tame. You need to intentionally play badly to have any unrest problem and even then they are easy to handle. That makes empires, no matter the size, very stable even when you are a conquering slaver.
 
Okay here are my opinions
  • More interesting mechanics for pre-FTL civilizations.
This is a pretty good long term idea that can enable us play as a pre-FTL species /Trying to unify our world first without glassing each other and when we reach the space we see many advanced species with different personalities trying to win our favour (maybe they cannot colonise continental worlds but we can for example)

So may does that work ?

Well,
  • A 'galactic community' with interstellar politics and a 'space UN'.
Can say that all FTL species must obey not to exterminate or conquer the pre-FTL and pre-sentient species so as not to upset the "galactic balance" as well as many other things...
But i really like the idea of Space UN. The galaxy seem so closed off when we dont have something like this.

  • Reworking the endgame crises to be more balanced against each other and the size/state of the galaxy.
This is a well suited option for involving Galactic UN as well. An emergency meeting with all galactic neighbours to band together agains a common enemy.
*Maybe we can create a common resource pool so that empires with low navy capacity can donate minerals and energy.
*High capacity empires will then use these to create a navy that can fight against the "enemy"
or
  • Buildable Dreadnoughts and Titans / or massive size Crucible (Mass Effect) as a weapon to counter the hive/ai

Overall i think Utopia brought fresh air to the game and i really appreciate it and the list for the upcoming features are really good. Good work Wiz and the Devs
 
Reworks to war to address the 'doomstacks' issue and make the strategic and tactical layers of warfare more interesting and less micro-intensive.

What exactly do you mean by 'less micro-intensive'? I personally wouldn't call Stellaris warfare very micro-intensive since you don't have to control individual units.
 
Looking forward to all of those, greate work so far!

One thing:

Are you aware of the current issues the AI is having in maintaining a fleet of assault armies and how this is hampering its ability to wage war effectively to the point where wars often stagnate heavily, especially with the "high" aggression setting turned on ?
Any plans on addressing this at least somewhat in 1.6, pretty please ?
 
It's not in order of priority.

Have you considered modeling ship combat after the idea of individual crews and the importance of individual ships?

Think about Star Trek and the Enterprise.

Individual ships should matter. Large fleets should only be needed and come together in dire circumstances.