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Stellaris Dev Diary #174 - Federations is out, now what?

Hello everyone!

Federations was released a little bit over a week ago, and we hope it's still giving you much joy.

There’s much to celebrate as the community has broken a bunch of records! We had 64-thousand people playing Stellaris on Saturday, which is the highest amount of concurrent players since its release 4 years ago. We want to thank you for the massive amount of support we’ve received with this expansion! We hope everyone has found this expansion as fun and enjoyable as us.

While you are busy enjoying the game we’ve been planning updates and working on patches. We are currently working on a 2.6.3 that we’re planning on releasing as a beta sometime soon. 2.6.3 should hopefully be the last of the smaller patches, as we will be switching focus to a somewhat larger free update in May.

The May update (TBA) will contain more bug fixes, but also a bunch of new things for you to play with. We are very interested in hearing your feedback and ideas regarding Federations, and if there was anything you would have wished for us to add. We are especially interested in feedback related to Resolutions and Federation Laws. Although I will not promise they will be added, I still wanted to leave some room open in case there were ideas that the community really wanted.

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Will you protect the Tiyanki or hunt them for profit?
We will give you some more information about the May update at a later stage, so stay tuned! Until then, keep enjoying the game :)
 
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There should probably be some Spiritualist-leaning Resolutions for the Galactic Community, to counterbalance the Materialist-flavoured "increasingly unchecked research into Matters Better Left Alone" in the Unchained Knowledge line.

Or perhaps there should be both an "explicitly" Materialist AND Spiritualist line; the Materialist line could buff robot production and encourage greater automation, perhaps? While a Spiritualist line might focus on buffing Unity production and make automation/robots a breach of galactic law.

I, personally, would also LOVE if you expanded upon the themes of environmentalism vs. industrialization present in the Ecological Protection vs. Industrial Development chains... I think empires should have their own, individual policies along those lines, too, so we can decide whether we want to turn our worlds into polluted hellscapes or not without having to pass galaxy-wide laws to do so.
 
The economic AI is so much better, the military AI is close but there's a few odd behaviours and bugs around that, I think if they are fixed it'll be SUCH a huge improvement.

In terms of Federations, it'd be nice to be able to use Favours to change Federation laws. Often, you just get stuck in a particular position with Federations and you can't change it (ie. succession type). It'd be good to be able to have a way to remedy that.
 
We are especially interested in feedback related to Resolutions and Federation Laws.

Well, it's very good. So there's that.

But I would like for there to be more information available to the player, in an easier to find format. For example, if an empire is in breach of galactic law, what laws are they breaking? Where can I find out what the current galactic laws are without scrolling through all the resolutions and tool-tiping over them. Where can I find out what policies etc other empires have enacted so I can find out how best to screw them over with resolutions?

Also, the new UI layout for federation laws is very good, why not use it also for your empire policies screen. Let the Age of Needlessly Small Windows For Long Lists come to an End!

Also, I should be able to request favours from AIs when they propose things like research treaties or wars or whatever. Right now they just seem like something you buy.
 
There should probably be some Spiritualist-leaning Resolutions for the Galactic Community, to counterbalance the Materialist-flavoured "increasingly unchecked research into Matters Better Left Alone" in the Unchained Knowledge line.
Yea, its fairly anoying that as a mainly spiritualist the AI always jumps on teh "Unchained knowledge" bandwagon, even against their own interest and there is very litle i can do besides trowing a bunch of influence at it to veto the resolution when it starts ebcomming harmfull. I'd rather have a counter resolution instead so i can finaly try and push for stuff i want, instead of trying to prevent stuff.
 
Can you maybe do something about the AI voting/pressing resolutions that are counterproductive to their interests? The logic seems a little iffy. Right now it just seems like they vote yes on everything. Every motion has passed so far in my game, overwhelmingly. An empire shouldn't really be voting yes on the Galactic Readiness Act AND the Guardian Angels Act.
 
Oh, one small thing. Machine Empire specific Federation types! Or Hive Mind. And they could have unique succession types too:

eg. Computation Problem: for Machine Empires where they have to be the first to solve some complex computation, which would take into account technology level and number of pops
 
There should probably be some Spiritualist-leaning Resolutions for the Galactic Community, to counterbalance the Materialist-flavoured "increasingly unchecked research into Matters Better Left Alone" in the Unchained Knowledge line.

Or perhaps there should be both an "explicitly" Materialist AND Spiritualist line; the Materialist line could buff robot production and encourage greater automation, perhaps? While a Spiritualist line might focus on buffing Unity production and make automation/robots a breach of galactic law.

I, personally, would also LOVE if you expanded upon the themes of environmentalism vs. industrialization present in the Ecological Protection vs. Industrial Development chains... I think empires should have their own, individual policies along those lines, too, so we can decide whether we want to turn our worlds into polluted hellscapes or not without having to pass galaxy-wide laws to do so.

This. We need more options in the Galactic Community.
Also, we currently have an Egalitarian focused Law-path. Why not add some laws that would be favorable for Authoritarians?
 
It would be awesome to get some easier modding tools, such as automatic weight calculation, because currently adding traits and modifiers kinda sucks (a lot of work *and* most importantly it breaks compatibility that I have to mod jobs when adding traits)
 
The edict that you get from greater than ourselves does not appear to work with synths
Don't know if this is by design but I really would like to see that just be an edict for all and no restrictions on pop types as late game pop management is too clickly and just not fun.

Other than that loving the update, never used to complain about pop management because the game used to lag up by that point. Now the performance improvements are there managing them pops is hard work
 
That is an improvement that is already planned for the update :)

We will make it more clear how the votes went, and allow you to use favors

My ONE concern with this is that it should still be impossible to get certain empires to vote for certain things, you should never be able to:

- Get a Pacifist empire with Weak pops to vote to make Arena Combat the Succession Type for the Federation
- Get a Materialist empire to vote for Psionic Battle

And so on... some things should have an extra weight to stop you just overriding it with Favors when it really wouldn't make any sense.
 
There are small bugs about repealing some resoultions. For example, if you reapeal Unchained Knowledge's Level 3 resolution which bans Outlawed Artificial Intelligence Policy and Passive Studies Native Interference Policy after you propose it, you will still have problem with use those policies.