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Hi everyone!

As @grekulf has mentioned, one of our key aims in the upcoming Lem update is to improve the value of our existing DLCs by adding new content to them. As part of this effort, several of our species packs have seen some love. This week, I will start us off by talking about some of the upcoming changes to the Necroids species pack.

While we were overall very happy with the content that went into Necroids (indeed, it has set a high bar for our other species packs to match!), a few of us - both within the team and in the community as a whole - regretted a few of the missed opportunities. The Lem update has provided us with the opportunity to rectify this.

Necrophage Hive Minds

There have been quite a few calls for allowing Hive Minds to be Necrophages, and with Lem, this will now be possible!

1623927984810.png


The will work similarly to normal Necrophages, but with a few differences:
  • Flavour texts that assume individual intelligences have been rewritten to fit the hive theme better
  • Hive Minds generally cannot support non-Hive individuals within their empire except as Livestock, and Necrophage Hive Minds are no different there. However, unlike other Hive Minds, Necro-Hives will allow their Livestock to procreate. The Livestock can then be subsumed into the Hive via Centers of Elevation.
    • Unlike normal Necrophages, Necro-Hive Necrophytes don’t use Consumer Goods. Instead, their upkeep of Food (or Minerals, if they are Lithoid) has been doubled.
1623935247824.png

  • Like normal Necrophages, Necro-Hives can also use the Necrophage Purge to speed things up a bit. For this purpose (but in a change applying generally to all Hive Minds), Hive Minds are now allowed to purge Gestalt pops that are not of their main species again.
  • Making Hive Worlds make sense for Necrophages is a bit complicated, as there was previously a hard block on non-Hive pops living there - the planet would eat them, effectively. The solution we are currently working on is to allow Necro-Hive specifically to bring their Necrophytes there.
  • Just as you can combine Fanatic Purifier with Necrophage, so you can also be a Devouring Swarm (or Terravore) Necrophage

General Necrophage Changes

It has not escaped notice that Necrophages are quite strong. A lot of the things that make them cool and fun to play also make them very powerful, so it’s a fine line to tread on. However, we have managed to come up with a set of changes that bring them a bit more in line with other starts while maintaining the spirit of the Origin:
  • Non-purging Necrophages no longer start with two extra pops than other non-standard origins (purging ones keep the extra pops because they are likely to lose a few pops through purging).
  • The guaranteed primitive worlds may no longer contain primitives that have advanced beyond the Iron Age (previous limit was Steam Age), and will have more defensive armies than very early primitives usually have. This is to make their start not quite as outright better than other starts.
  • Centers of Elevation no longer provide stability bonuses, and the job’s unity output has been cut by a quarter.
  • The chance of pops escaping during Necrophage purging has been increased from 10% to 25%. This is now also communicated to players in tooltips.
1623935403610.png


Death Cults

In contrast to Necrophages, with the advent of 3.0 and its accompanying pop growth changes, it has been felt that Death Cults - though interesting mechanically and flavour-wise - have somewhat fallen behind the curve in terms of bonuses. In other words, more reward is needed for sacrificing your pops.

One of the issues we had at the time when we implemented it was the limited possibilities for using proper mathematical formulas in Stellaris scripts. However, as hinted in my previous dev diary, that particular bottleneck has now been alleviated (in fact, we have gone considerably further than hinted there - Lem will have a lot of positive surprises for modders!).

Previously, when you chose to sacrifice your populace, you would gain a portion of the bonus as a fixed modifier, and another portion scaled by the raw number of pops you sacrificed. This remains similar, but with one key difference: the scaled modifier is now scaled by the % of your total number of pops you have sacrificed.

We are still working on the exact numbers, but the gist of this is that you will now tend to get a lot better bonuses per pop you sacrifice, especially in the early game.


Reanimated Armies

Changes have also been made to Reanimated Armies. While the fantasy of being able to reanimate corpses to fight for you was pretty cool, in practice the impact of unlocking a new army type - which you had to research a separate technology to unlock - was quite underwhelming. For that reason, a number of changes have been made:
  • You can now build Dread Encampments from day 1. Countries starting with the civic will have one on their starting planet
  • Dread Encampments are generally more useful to have now: they now provide two Necromancer jobs (up from 1), and Necromancers now produce 6 each of society and physics (up from 4), though their number of defensive armies they spawn has been cut from 4 to 3.
  • Building a Dread Encampment replaces your Defense Armies with Undead Defense Armies, which are somewhat stronger
1623935473810.png

  • When you defeat any organic enemy army in battle, you now have a one in three chance of resurrecting them to join your own forced - in effect immediately spawning an Undead (offensive) Army
  • Finally, if an empire with Undead Armies defeats the Voidspawn or Tiyanki Matriarch, they can now resurrect them to fight in their own fleets!
1623936542984.png



That’s all for today. Stay tuned to hear more about our plans for the Lem update!
 
I mean...remember that there has been a calculated 100 billion humans who have ever lived. The phrase "silent majority"? Actually refers to the dead.

Its likely really easy to scrounge up enough dead to form entire armies if you been doing necromancy for long enough.
I understand there are uncountable "reservist", but why undead army replace the army spawned by soldier? That means, they wouldn't spawn without soldier.
 
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I really don't know why you drag the problem of hives having bad or boring civics into this. That's another problem. It should be addressed in the patch but it is another problem.

Memorialist is just so much better than any other stability boosting civic and tech that it should be addressed because it is part of the necroids dlc, which this Dev diary is about.

The point is that nerfing Civics when most of them are not even close to competitive to begin with is a terrible, awful idea. This goes not just for Hiveminds or Megacorps, but for normal empires and machines as well.

Buff the rest of the Civics in the game so that they're actually worth using outside of niche RP, don't destroy the few that actually have flavor AND power.
 
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One thing I wonder about, which could be an entertaining bug depending on how the Necro-Matriarch is setup is from this in the wiki, is, will killing a Necro-matriarch still count as breaching the Conservation Act?
Defeating the Tiyanki Matriarch will breach the Galactic Law if the Tiyanki Conservation Act Resolution was passed and the empire is a member of the Galactic Community. Doing so will also incur a fine of -5000 Energy Credits.
... Will resurrecting one technically count as "conservation" and award you 5k EC? Necrophages could get a CB to "capture" the corpse (as if it was a relic) from other killer-empires.
We could start a Necro-Zoo full of undead alien pets... like an edgier Jurassic park.

1623965237638.png

As an aside, I never understood why Alien pets were planet-bound, and not made in to full 'exotic fauna' resources tradeable between empires?
What decadent rulers wouldn't want some, as pop-upkeep costs?, and wouldn't be willing to fund a Crime Syndicate's illegal animal smuggling ring, after it filibusters relaxing animal welfare controls in the GC?
 
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Is there any particular reason why Ether Drake can't be resurrected? It seems pretty biological to me.
I'm guessing because you can already get one, and maybe also because it's not actually part of this universal big bang/big crunch cycle so its biology is simply too foreign for that.
 
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Loving the expansion of all the civics! Being able to resurrect Space-borne organisms is inspired, love the angle you took to buffing reanimated armies. Can't wait to see how the changes to Death Cult play out, but I'd really like the restrictions to be relaxed on who can pick them. A Fanatical purifier who also voluntarily sacrifices their own citizens is an amazing Rp, and while you can still technically do it with end of the cycle Death Cult would be far easier. The nerfs to necrophage are welcome, they were definitely a little too high on the power level and I think the nerfs do a good job of bringing them back in line without going too far.

I really hope this focus on adding new stuff to civics (and just new civics flat out!) is continued. Hives, robots, and mega corps are in desperate need of more civics, and most normal empire civics are pretty underwhelming as well.
 
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The Necrophage nerf seems a bit excessive and not aimed well. The problem was always the free jumpstart to pop growth from primitives, which gives them an overpowered early game. That seems to not be nerfed, except that maybe 2-4 armies are needed rather than just 1? That's barely changing it. A few hundred minerals is still cheaper than even a single colony ship.

Meanwhile Necrophage purge has always seemed to be heavily overrated and takes a gigantic nerf. Losing 25% of pops will be pretty awful now. The ability to assimilate foreign pops to your pops is not really that good, at most situations at best you'll gain 10-15% production from it which is far worse than the 25% overall pop loss.
 
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I love the news and I don't mean to pushy, but in addition to nerfing Necrophages a little, I would like PDX to also address the fact that there is very little reason to not play a Lithoid if you choose to run a number Necrophage empire, save for RPing and/or access to more portraits.
 
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Hi everyone!

As @grekulf has mentioned, one of our key aims in the upcoming Lem update is to improve the value of our existing DLCs by adding new content to them. As part of this effort, several of our species packs have seen some love. This week, I will start us off by talking about some of the upcoming changes to the Necroids species pack.

While we were overall very happy with the content that went into Necroids (indeed, it has set a high bar for our other species packs to match!), a few of us - both within the team and in the community as a whole - regretted a few of the missed opportunities. The Lem update has provided us with the opportunity to rectify this.

Necrophage Hive Minds

There have been quite a few calls for allowing Hive Minds to be Necrophages, and with Lem, this will now be possible!

View attachment 732533

The will work similarly to normal Necrophages, but with a few differences:
  • Flavour texts that assume individual intelligences have been rewritten to fit the hive theme better
  • Hive Minds generally cannot support non-Hive individuals within their empire except as Livestock, and Necrophage Hive Minds are no different there. However, unlike other Hive Minds, Necro-Hives will allow their Livestock to procreate. The Livestock can then be subsumed into the Hive via Centers of Elevation.
    • Unlike normal Necrophages, Necro-Hive Necrophytes don’t use Consumer Goods. Instead, their upkeep of Food (or Minerals, if they are Lithoid) has been doubled.
View attachment 732550
  • Like normal Necrophages, Necro-Hives can also use the Necrophage Purge to speed things up a bit. For this purpose (but in a change applying generally to all Hive Minds), Hive Minds are now allowed to purge Gestalt pops that are not of their main species again.
  • Making Hive Worlds make sense for Necrophages is a bit complicated, as there was previously a hard block on non-Hive pops living there - the planet would eat them, effectively. The solution we are currently working on is to allow Necro-Hive specifically to bring their Necrophytes there.
  • Just as you can combine Fanatic Purifier with Necrophage, so you can also be a Devouring Swarm (or Terravore) Necrophage

General Necrophage Changes

It has not escaped notice that Necrophages are quite strong. A lot of the things that make them cool and fun to play also make them very powerful, so it’s a fine line to tread on. However, we have managed to come up with a set of changes that bring them a bit more in line with other starts while maintaining the spirit of the Origin:
  • Non-purging Necrophages no longer start with two extra pops than other non-standard origins (purging ones keep the extra pops because they are likely to lose a few pops through purging).
  • The guaranteed primitive worlds may no longer contain primitives that have advanced beyond the Iron Age (previous limit was Steam Age), and will have more defensive armies than very early primitives usually have. This is to make their start not quite as outright better than other starts.
  • Centers of Elevation no longer provide stability bonuses, and the job’s unity output has been cut by a quarter.
  • The chance of pops escaping during Necrophage purging has been increased from 10% to 25%. This is now also communicated to players in tooltips.
View attachment 732551

Death Cults

In contrast to Necrophages, with the advent of 3.0 and its accompanying pop growth changes, it has been felt that Death Cults - though interesting mechanically and flavour-wise - have somewhat fallen behind the curve in terms of bonuses. In other words, more reward is needed for sacrificing your pops.

One of the issues we had at the time when we implemented it was the limited possibilities for using proper mathematical formulas in Stellaris scripts. However, as hinted in my previous dev diary, that particular bottleneck has now been alleviated (in fact, we have gone considerably further than hinted there - Lem will have a lot of positive surprises for modders!).

Previously, when you chose to sacrifice your populace, you would gain a portion of the bonus as a fixed modifier, and another portion scaled by the raw number of pops you sacrificed. This remains similar, but with one key difference: the scaled modifier is now scaled by the % of your total number of pops you have sacrificed.

We are still working on the exact numbers, but the gist of this is that you will now tend to get a lot better bonuses per pop you sacrifice, especially in the early game.


Reanimated Armies

Changes have also been made to Reanimated Armies. While the fantasy of being able to reanimate corpses to fight for you was pretty cool, in practice the impact of unlocking a new army type - which you had to research a separate technology to unlock - was quite underwhelming. For that reason, a number of changes have been made:
  • You can now build Dread Encampments from day 1. Countries starting with the civic will have one on their starting planet
  • Dread Encampments are generally more useful to have now: they now provide two Necromancer jobs (up from 1), and Necromancers now produce 6 each of society and physics (up from 4), though their number of defensive armies they spawn has been cut from 4 to 3.
  • Building a Dread Encampment replaces your Defense Armies with Undead Defense Armies, which are somewhat stronger
View attachment 732552
  • When you defeat any organic enemy army in battle, you now have a one in three chance of resurrecting them to join your own forced - in effect immediately spawning an Undead (offensive) Army
  • Finally, if an empire with Undead Armies defeats the Voidspawn or Tiyanki Matriarch, they can now resurrect them to fight in their own fleets!
View attachment 732555


That’s all for today. Stay tuned to hear more about our plans for the Lem update!
very cool that I can now play as a fungus like being to spread across the galaxy
 
(since the Army system isn't very fun)
It'd be awesome if there was a chance to resurrect parts of the enemy fleets after engagement. It'd be hard to balance, but would make that civic even more appealing to the RPer in my.

Image the design of the ships in a zombie fleet!
 
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The reanimate biological guardian option is really what makes the civic interesting. How about one step further? Make them able to reanimate normal space creatures as well, e.g. tyanki, space amoeba
 
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There is one thing that seems odd about reanimated armies and is that this civic can be removed.

RP wise seems strange and doesn't make sense: What happens to all the undead armies whenever you change civics? seems to me like this is one of those civics that can not be added or removed from the start, or at least one civic that you can embrace but then you can't remove.

I understand there are uncountable "reservist", but why undead army replace the army spawned by soldier? That means, they wouldn't spawn without soldier.

Also I agree with this, it doesn't seem something neccessary, one should be able to have mixed reanimated armies and defense armies.
Will resurrected Titanic Beasts become regular zombies, or will they be some flavour of undead kaiju awesomeness?
I like the flavour of this, ground combat tend to be so irrelevant that this is still fair and balanced, also very fun indeed. That kind of resurrected armies should at least give more than one zombie army.
Since we now have defensive reanimated armies...

Are we gonna have a "Defensive army type" policy ?

Like : I have Clones armies / Psionic Armies available, let me put the second one by default on all my planets
This is a MUST trying to improve ground combat is EZ and this is a very good idea to keep in mind that can add a lot of flavour too
Reanimating defeated leviathans sounds awesome! Would be really cool if you could reanimate all organic leviathans, but also all organic space fauna!
I agree with this, pacifists and xenophile empires have an option to pacify space fauna... Why not giving this civic a project of his own too! one where you can research corpses and then get an option to revive those poor things in exchange of a reasonable amount of food and energy.

Doesn't seem like something unbalanced as space fauna is not really hard to defeat and in order to get them early you should invest valuable research into that project + a good chunk of energy which is scarce in early game most of the times.
 
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Okay reanimated armies is actually an interasting civic now.
 
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