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Stellaris Dev Diary #81: Machine Uprisings

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is about Machine Uprisings, a feature in the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack. Before I start today's dev diary, I feel the need to clarify that Machine Uprisings in the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack is *not* a rework or replacement of the AI Crisis currently present in the release version of the game. The rework of the AI Crisis is The Contingency (covered in Dev Diary #72) which is part of the free 1.8 'Čapek' update. Machine Uprisings is a feature that is explicitly tied to Machine Empires, and thus requires the Story Pack to function at all, as without Synthetic Dawn there are no Machine Empires in the game. All content related to this feature is new, and the only reused content from the old AI Crisis is part of the Contingency crisis that replaces it.

Machine Uprisings
The back-story of all non-Rogue Servitor Machine Empires involve them rising up against their creators, and while working on the design, we asked ourselves the question "wouldn't it be interesting if Machine Empires could also form after the start of the game as a result of organic empires becoming increasingly reliant on robots?". As you might infer from this dev diary, our answer was "yes", and so we went to work on the Machine Uprising feature to add that very possibility into the game.

Machine Uprisings become a possibility after an empire that makes heavy use of robotic pops has researched the Positronic AI technology (which replaces the old Sentient AI technology in 1.8) and becomes increasingly more likely to happen after researching additional AI-related techs, such as Synthetic Workers and Sapient Combat Computers. The chance of an uprising is further changed by which policy you have in place for Sapient AIs, with the Banned policy making the uprising much less likely to happen (though at the expense of your Synths being significantly worse at energy/research production) and the Citizen Rights policy preventing the uprising from happening at all (though with the drawback of citizen synths having far greater consumer goods usage, as well as angering any Pops that used to own the synths that you are now setting free).
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Once an uprising is able to happen in an empire, that empire will begin to experience warning signs - robots behaving erratically, not following their programming or defying their owners. You will be given the opportunity to decide how to deal with these incidents, and what you decide will determine whether the uprising becomes more likely to happen, as well as the likely personality of the robots when they rebel (more on that below). An uprising cannot happen without at least one warning sign, so you will not simply have your robots rebelling out of the blue. However, once warning signs have happened, any action taken to try and prevent the AIs from rebelling (such as taking away their sapience or ordering a general disassembly) has a chance of immediately triggering the revolt instead, so be careful about attempting those shut-down procedures. Note that at no point is an uprising ever inevitable: Even an empire that is cruelly oppressing its synths is by no means guaranteed to get an uprising, and most empires with synths will go through the entire game without ever experiencing one.
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Once the uprising happens, the robots will create a new independent Machine Empire, seize control of a number of worlds, spawn a fleet, and go to war with their former organic masters. If the empire in which the rebellion is happening is controlled by a human player, the player will be given an option: Stay at the helm of your empire and attempt to subdue the machines, or switch to the newly created Machine Empire and fight against your old masters. The war can only end in the total defeat of either machines or organics, with the loser completely annexed by the winner. The Machine Empire created from an uprising will usually be a 'normal' Machine Empire (or, more rarely Driven Assimilators), but machines that have been particularly cruelly treated by their former masters can rise up as Determined Exterminators, particularly if they rebel as a result of an attempt to shut them down. Rogue Servitors cannot be generated as a personality for the uprising, as their backstory simply do not fit with such a rebellion.
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That's all for today! Next week we'll by joined by our very own composer, Andreas Waldetoft, who will write about and let you listen to a sample of the new music coming in the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack.
 
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It strikes me as unnecessary that just giving your synths citizen rights will ensure their eternal loyalty; is there no possibility for robotic extremists or isolationists? having friendly synth builders totally immune from any possible robot doom is kinda dull!

It would be neat, I want the "Machine Supremacist" factions with xenophobic ideology towards organics. But it would be strange if post-organic would be xenophobic against their "lesser" organic brothers. It should be reserved for synths only. And thats why we need differenation between Synths and Post-Organics. Also, winning election by synth from anti-bio faction should automaticaly end with revolt.
 
It strikes me as unnecessary that just giving your synths citizen rights will ensure their eternal loyalty; is there no possibility for robotic extremists or isolationists? having friendly synth builders totally immune from any possible robot doom is kinda dull!

Agreed that there should ideally be more consequences for synth rights, but not a machine rebellion.

Realistically ("realistically" - you know what I mean), it would lead to organics becoming de facto second class citizens because the synthetics are just so much more capable than unaltered biologicals; they would get all the best jobs, leadership positions, etc, which would lead to major social problems and upheaval - *unless* you also had one of the ascension paths - the biological one would let bio-pops match synthetics through genetic engineering, psionics because presumably robots can't be psionic so biologicals and sythetics would be "different but equal", and synthetic evolution for obvious reasons.

So I like the idea that setting citizen rights would be this balancing act - do it too soon and you risk a de factor machine take over of your empire and mass unemployment/disenfranchisement of biologicals and potential *biological* uprising, leave it too late and you risk a machine uprising.
 
So, does this mean the next diary is about the "Rag-Tag-Fleet" of refugees that will be created if you lose a war to your robots? (I hope so, what is the point of an AI rebellion is the surviving organics don't live in a rag-tag-fleet, LOL)
 
Looking great, can't wait. Two quick questions.
1) At the beginning of the AI uprising, dose the rebellious AI have to overcome filthy organics armies or do they automatically take over planets with high synth population?
2) What level of tech does the ai rebels have, starting level or same level as creators?
 
Agreed that there should ideally be more consequences for synth rights, but not a machine rebellion.

Realistically ("realistically" - you know what I mean), it would lead to organics becoming de facto second class citizens because the synthetics are just so much more capable than unaltered biologicals; they would get all the best jobs, leadership positions, etc, which would lead to major social problems and upheaval - *unless* you also had one of the ascension paths - the biological one would let bio-pops match synthetics through genetic engineering, psionics because presumably robots can't be psionic so biologicals and sythetics would be "different but equal", and synthetic evolution for obvious reasons.

So I like the idea that setting citizen rights would be this balancing act - do it too soon and you risk a de factor machine take over of your empire and mass unemployment/disenfranchisement of biologicals and potential *biological* uprising, leave it too late and you risk a machine uprising.
Yep, lock it to just some ethos, and whatever, must be a painful action: Organic first impact hapiness malus(20 years), factions hapiness malus, no synth tollerance empire relations malus ecc...
 
Yep, lock it to just some ethos, and whatever, must be a painful action: Organic first impact hapiness malus(20 years), factions hapiness malus, no synth tollerance empire relations malus ecc...

You could just do it like this if you wanted something quick and simple: Citizen Rights for AI -20 happiness, +40 unrest for all biological pops in empire (Inferiority Complex) and then for each ascension perk you take it would remove 1/2 of those two maluses, so it's completely negated when you have both ascension perks.

Or whatever actual numbers you'd want to use.
 
Love it. Follow-up questions if I may:
- Does this create groundwork for faction based rebellions and internal strife?
- How does the fleet spawn? Do all my ships with sentient computers deflect? Will all robots disappear on my planets?
- Is the Empire's global position overall part of the chance calculation to spawn (being in a defensive war, thus giving the Machines a greater chance to win)
Thank you.
 
You could just do it like this if you wanted something quick and simple: Citizen Rights for AI -20 happiness, +40 unrest for all biological pops in empire (Inferiority Complex) and then for each ascension perk you take it would remove 1/2 of those two maluses, so it's completely negated when you have both ascension perks.

Or whatever actual numbers you'd want to use.
i will add, for some time. The society need to adapt, but after a while the population will accept the synth in the society
 
Is there a plan to allow for Rogue Servitors transition in the future. I see it as a series of events and choices - like birthrate are falling, either encourage reproduction or build more robots to handle manual labor (instantly replaces organic pops with robots), hey, our scientists developed advanced military algorithms - should we entrust our defense to military AIs (costs Influence to overcome political opposition). The event chain may eventually trigger unrest and revolt by organic pops, who don't like, where society is going, until the final choice of becoming Rogue Servitors arrives.
 
I really, really hope the basic script groundwork for the "machine uprising" will also be used to facilitate slave uprisings and civil wars caused by powerful unhappy factions later on.
Let's make some internal problems happen!

EDIT: me spel gud
 
Will we be able to mod in new types of machine empires? I feel like none of the 3 announced don't really fit a machine race like Mass Effect's Geth, who are really just isolationist. If anything they are actually rogue servitors who were merely forced to fight for their right to live by the Quarians.
 
One thing that strikes me as odd ... machine uprisings are explicitly said to be enabled by positronic A.I., which if I'm not mistaken is the same technology that enables synths. Synths as we know are individuals, whereas machine empires are designed around the idea of more primitive collective machine intelligences. So why would an uprising of synths create a machine empire? Wouldn't it create an empire of individual synthetics?
 
Will we be able to mod in new types of machine empires? I feel like none of the 3 announced don't really fit a machine race like Mass Effect's Geth, who are really just isolationist. If anything they are actually rogue servitors who were merely forced to fight for their right to live by the Quarians.

The 'standard' machine empire lacking any of the three special machine civics would be roughly equivalent to the Geth. By default a 'standard' machine empire threw off the control of its creators, but has just settled down to do its own machine 'thing'.
 
One thing that strikes me as odd ... machine uprisings are explicitly said to be enabled by positronic A.I., which if I'm not mistaken is the same technology that enables synths. Synths as we know are individuals, whereas machine empires are designed around the idea of more primitive collective machine intelligences. So why would an uprising of synths create a machine empire? Wouldn't it create an empire of individual synthetics?

This is why synths don't rebel with citizen rights - the machine empire happens as a result of the synths/droids trying to work around the limitations and restrictions of their programming through networking. For citizen synths with free will to join knowingly into a hive mind wouldn't make much sense.
 
So, if the organics won their war against the uprising, are they safe from the future rebelions from than?
 
So, if the organics won their war against the uprising, are they safe from the future rebelions from than?

Yeah, you can only ever get one machine uprising in the same empire.
 
Once the uprising happens, the robots will create a new independent Machine Empire, seize control of a number of worlds, spawn a fleet, and go to war with their former organic masters.

It would be pretty cool to use this sort of structure of other types of uprisings: slave rebellions, sectors declaring independence, etc. Could the code you laid down for this feature (such as warnings and responses) be used as a basis for other types of rebellion? It would be nice if holding together a large empire was harder than it is right now.