Hello everyone!

As promised on the stream last week, I’d write a shorter dev diary to let you know what we’re up to now. As you probably have heard, I have now taken over as the game director for Stellaris, so that Martin can go work on [REDACTED]. Check out Martin’s goodbye message on twitter if you haven’t already!

So what are we doing now then? We have updated the beta branch last week, and will update it again soon before we disappear for a brief while over the holidays. Whenever it's ready, Jamie will be making a post about it. The beta branch should include some performance improvements related to slowdowns caused by gateways and wormholes in later stages of the game.

In the beginning of the next year we will be taking more time for post-launch support by focusing on bugs, improving performance and more quality-of-life stuff. One small spoiler that I can mention is that we’re looking into improving the planet interface, and I’ll probably post some more sneak peeks about it in the beginning of next year

We don’t really have that much more to say right now, but I will try to be back with the next dev on the 10th or 17th of January.

Until then, have a great holiday with family, friends, and of course, the Blorg! Happy holidays!

Blorg celebrating the holidays. Date unknown. Photographer unknown, but most likely the blorg itself.​

 

[Fjolsvid]

Hey Alastor, check out the post I made regarding massively slow load times and what I did to fix it. Been playing since then and I also noticed a substantial improvement in the smoothness of the galaxy during early game.

Before things were a little shuddery, now it's running as I remember in earlier patches.

Might help you out.

Could you link the post, please?

 

[Minuro]

Really cool work, dudes.

 

[Robotkiller]

Can we talk about the cheating AI rushing fleet power in the first 30 years? I cannot minmax my economy enough to keep up in the early game. I understand why the AI has to cheat, but would like a chance to defend myself. 30 years in as devouring swarm with 900 fleet power and 7 colonized planets while another swarm ruins my game with only 3 planets and 1300 fleet power on Ensign difficulty. It's really frustrating to lose a couple of hours like this.

 

[RageOfAnubis]

Would you be able to say anything about possible changes to Rogue Servitors and machine empires in general? I get that they were overpowered in 2.1 but it seems like you have been a bit too liberal in your application of the nerf hammer.

Also, any updates on the unicorn portrait?

A very merry Blorgmas to you

 

[InvisibleBison]

If you do add unicorn portraits, could you also add a way to disable certain portraits from being used by AI empires? I personally don't want unicorns in my game.

 

[Devanor]

View attachment 432790
Blorg celebrating the holidays. Date unknown. Photographer unknown, but most likely the blorg itself.​

Forever Alone a Blorg

 

[Mikhail_Mengsk]

It's the market prices and piracy on trade routes calculations. Both on a daily tick. Both hard-coded.

Wait, but how comes i didn't have before, when i played with 18AIs up until 2300+ with no lag at all? And why on day one when there are no trade routes and the market is "stable"?

 

[MightyGlue]

Can we talk about the cheating AI rushing fleet power in the first 30 years? I cannot minmax my economy enough to keep up in the early game. I understand why the AI has to cheat, but would like a chance to defend myself. 30 years in as devouring swarm with 900 fleet power and 7 colonized planets while another swarm ruins my game with only 3 planets and 1300 fleet power on Ensign difficulty. It's really frustrating to lose a couple of hours like this.

Maybe you should build some more anchorages or fortresses to give you more naval capacity. 900 fleetpower with 7 planets sounds like you are still stuck on the starting 20 naval cap. Building a fleet is not really about minmaxing. Build 2 or 3 alloy forges (make sure you have enough minerals to feed them, but with 7 planets that shouldn't be a problem), raise your naval cap and you should be good to go.
Also, a 1300 fleet should be easily crushed by a level 1 starbase with 2 defensive modules and some defensive plattforms.

 

[Ramiren]

Unless the promised performance update is rather substantial that means you are effectively leaving us with a game that has crippling performance issues, particularly in the late game, over the holidays.

Kinda hard to be happy about that.

Believe me, I'm as pissed off as you are about this, but if they say they have a fix incoming the decent thing to do is let it drop and see if it resolves the problem. Hopefully the wormhole bug in question is the primary issue effecting performance and this resolves it. If it doesn't I'll be raising hell with Steam customer service about refunding Megacorp regardless of time played and I'm pretty sure even the most diehard paradox fanboys will think twice about their pre-orders and day 1 purchases if this game remains unplayable for a full month.

 

[Alastor]

Believe me, I'm as pissed off as you are about this, but if they say they have a fix incoming the decent thing to do is let it drop and see if it resolves the problem. Hopefully the wormhole bug in question is the primary issue effecting performance and this resolves it. If it doesn't I'll be raising hell with Steam customer service about refunding Megacorp regardless of time played and I'm pretty sure even the most diehard paradox fanboys will think twice about their pre-orders and day 1 purchases if this game remains unplayable for a full month.

The decent thing to do would have been to not release a game with such issues. We're past the decent thing now. Nevertheless I'm not saying I won't wait for their fix, what option do I have? But we were just told that the team will be off till mid January, so I'm simply restating my position that in that case a substantial performance fix before Christmas should be released. To avoid being left with a problematic product for weeks and no progress on a fix.

 

[Ramiren]

The decent thing to do would have been to not release a game with such issues. We're past the decent thing now. Nevertheless I'm not saying I won't wait for their fix, what option do I have? But we were just told that the team will be off till mid January, so I'm simply restating my position that in that case a substantial performance fix before Christmas should be released. To avoid being left with a problematic product for weeks and no progress on a fix.

If it comes down to that, like I said I'll be going straight to steam with video evidence of the issue and hopefully plenty of other people will be joining me. If steam don't do anything I'll take the 6 week ban and raise a paypal dispute. Either way I refuse to go another two weeks without a working product.

 

[AlphaAsh]

Wait, but how comes i didn't have before, when i played with 18AIs up until 2300+ with no lag at all? And why on day one when there are no trade routes and the market is "stable"?

Because they fixed a market exploit. Poorly.

 

[Moah]

Hopefully you improve resettlement and army windows for xenophile empires. Due the species spam caused by immigration and xenocompatibility both are pretty much useless when trying to figure out what army to create or finding out what species has correct habitability for the planet.

The resettlement window is sorted by habitability so the species at the top is the one with the most habitability for the target planet

 

[darkalex]

The resettlement window is sorted by habitability so the species at the top is the one with the most habitability for the target planet

I actually had no idea that's the case, thanks for the info.

Edit: Maybe you can find a way to make this visible in the resettlement screen, a lot of people playing will get frustrated why their unemployed pop will show up last because because they have no idea it's ordered on habitability.

 

[AlphaAsh]

I'm pretty sure even the most diehard paradox fanboys will think twice about their pre-orders and day 1 purchases if this game remains unplayable for a full month.

The fact they can and have suggests otherwise.

 

[Lys91]

I find the game quite playable. Although TBH I never play at full speed and listen to videos while playing PDX game, but still some critics seem a bit harsh.

If I had one thing to complain: can we reduce the number of megacorp being spawn? It feels like 1/3 of the galaxy is a corporation.

 

[Bearjuden]

Not convinced, since you have to wait until a specialist is available in real life for the new high specialized job. If you do the comparison with real life, you lose, because you simply cant explain why a coal miner turn into a rocket scientist in seconds.

I'd be happy to accept a delay in moving between any strata, if that's your point. No objections. I'm just trying to say that if you create an administrator job and a clerk job, pops should still fill the former job before the latter. The other person was arguing that if there is an open clerk job, an admin should leave their current job to fill it, which is insane.

 

[edenprime]

I hope pops portraits are going to be bigger in the new interface. I play on 1440p and since 2.2 I can barely see them. What's the point of buying portrait pack if it fills 2 pixels on my screen?

 

[laptor]

[...] In the beginning of the next year we will be taking more time for post-launch support by focusing on bugs, improving performance and more quality-of-life stuff. [...]

@grekulf Maybe you (the team) are already too annoyed to hear about it, but why is "teaching the AI to manage the game mechanics appropriately" not mentioned?
I know that AI does not sell the product, but releasing new content every year over several years without a well fleshed out AI seems like a fist in the faces of your long term supporters... :/

 

[Delthor]

Thanks for the amazing update. Despite the quality issues, Stellaris has never been better. I look forward to the new test branch and another awesome year after the holidays.