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Stellaris Dev Diary #226 - Custodians & Next Steps

Hello everyone!

Today I thought we’d go back and talk a bit about the Custodian Initiative and what the future can hold.

The 3.1 ‘Lem’ Update which we put out about 2 weeks ago contained a lot of good stuff that we'd been working on for some months. We’re really happy with how you have received the Custodian Initiative and the first free update, so it’s really fun to see that things seem to be moving in a clearly positive direction.

The Custodian Initiative
With the Custodian Initiative we’re doing a lot of new things at once, and in combination with a lot of internal changes as well, means we’re still learning and adapting. One goal that we haven’t been able to quite deploy a solution for is how to better work together with everyone in the community. We very much appreciate your feedback and we like to have constructive or fun interactions with you, and we want to figure out how to make this process more effective for us. For example, we’ve been thinking about how to have more public-facing bug tracking where you could potentially vote for issues (the voting functionality currently exists in our bug forums, albeit a bit more hidden than would be ideal). None of this has any concrete plans right now, but I thought it was important to mention anyway, so that you can more clearly know that we’re very interested in figuring out how to better make use of community engagement and feedback.

If you have any thoughts, let us know! We are also interested in hearing if you have ideas on how you can organize yourselves in the community to promote ideas, bugs and suggestions for improvements.

Our primary ways of interacting with you are our forums, reddit and discord.

Future Custodian Updates
As we’ve mentioned before, we aim to release a new free update about every 3 months. These updates will sometimes be released together with a new DLC. The next update is scheduled for late November.

In the November 3.2 update, our strategy will be to be a bit less ambitious than the Lem Update, and to focus on a bit more safe improvements. Going forwards, we may alternate between safe and more spicy changes for these free updates. Even if we aim to make 3.2 a bit safer, there will still be some interesting changes to look forward to – like pretty significant improvements for the AI. We will talk a bit more about that in detail next week. We will talk more about 3.2 in the coming weeks after that as well.

After 3.2 we will be aiming to release a 3.3 update sometime in February. This update will be a bit more spicy. Among other things, the Unity & Sprawl rework, mentioned earlier in dev diary 215, is likely to be finished and tested by then. Given the spiciness of these changes, we’re also looking into the possibility of an Open Beta for them to help things go as smoothly as possible :) We will be talking more about that in the coming months, mainly after November.

Keep in mind that the Custodian Initiative is still in its infancy and things are prone to change, so try to be patient with what you can expect with future updates. Together we'll be able to make Stellaris even more awesome!

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That is all for this week! Next week we will be back to talk about AI improvements for the upcoming 3.2 update.
 
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When it comes to voting on issues, I know that the developers for Democracy 4 have something like that. Where every patch they have a poll on the game’s starting screen with 5 options and a question asking what the community would want the devs to focus on. And that could be ”better balancing on harder difficulties”, ”fixing population bug”, ”more assassination events” and more. So there’s that.
 
Really hope AI improvements will also include updating the difficulty settings for the AI. Making the scaling difficulty more flexible, like being able to set scaling to start from Commodore difficulty rather than Cadet. I'm finding it hard to find a balance that enables some early game warmongering and that the AI would still give a good fight post mid game. Grand Admiral without scaling makes the early game mostly about just surviving and military civs perks are pretty useless until mid game.

I know there are some mods for AI scaling but to me they feel bit overwhelming. Playing just now with StarTech mod with Grand Admiral scaling on, early game has been so much fun and hoping it will stay interesting. Stellaris franchise has evolved nicely, sure bit rough patches here and there but I'm still excited what the future holds.
 
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God, how I love the custodian initiative. After several years of development, all games would benefit from something similar. Well done. And I can't wait to see what the next update will bring to the game.
 
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AttitudeAdjuster said:
in 5 years of stellaris this post is about the closest to a roadmap i've ever seen, so i'm pretty satisfied on that front ;D
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Back in february 2019 in Dev Diary #141 Grekulf gave a pretty good list of things they had on their plate:

DISCLAIMER: THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST, NOR IS ANYTHING FINAL OR CERTAIN TO HAPPEN

Future goals (in no particular order):
  • Pop growth: Look into how immigration/emigration works, try to make base growth across multiple planets less powerful, make habitability matter more again
  • Sectors & automation: Allow players to nudge which sectors planets belong to, reduce micromanagement by improving sector management tools
  • Backgrounds: Split up some civics into backgrounds, and add more backgrounds.
  • Civic flavour: Spend more time on making the civics feel more unique and fun
  • Institutions: Define which institutions make up your empire’s internal departments (such as Diplomatic Corps, Xenology Bureau etc.), and their funding, size and power.
  • Espionage: Intel to determine how much you know about another empire, spy actions, cloaking, sabotage & general mischief.
  • Religion & Cults: Similar to factions, cults could appear in your empire during certain circumstances. Spiritualist empires would most likely have “imperial” cults. Worship of powerful entities etc.
  • Archaeology: Explore the ruins of ancient civilizations
  • Subject contracts: Allow overlords to better customize what type of subjects they have, tribute levels, benefits to subject etc.
  • Federation depth: Allow federations to level up, have different election types, taxes etc.
  • Galactic Council: Create a sort of a ‘space UN’ with galactic politics and diplomacy
  • Primitives: Allow for more interactions with primitive pre-FTL species
I would say we have seen quite a bit of this list added since then. I would certainly be interested to see an update to this and perhaps a new one for the Primary team and one for the Custodians.
 
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Fantastic work!

Is there any chance for a spy rework? Namely to seperate spies from envoys. Right now the diplomacy and alliance system tends to suck up all available envoys leaving espionage forgotten until mid to late game where you can afford to spare an envoy for a rival.

Possibly a policy that allocates some percentage of representatives between diplo and spies?
 
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Kaoru Sen'nin said:
I just want to stress that I hope you abandonned the idea of using Unity for Administration. I don't see that being interresting in the slightest.
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On the contrary, I think it's a great idea. It would give unity a reason to be something empires actually need to have and would provide a reason to pick Spiritualist, which has almost always been one of the worst ethics choices.
 
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blahmaster6k said:
On the contrary, I think it's a great idea. It would give unity a reason to be something empires actually need to have and would provide a reason to pick Spiritualist, which has almost always been one of the worst ethics choices.
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That still won't eliminate the biggest issue with Spiritualism of pop. growth. Materialists have robots and cloning vats, while the Spiritualist Psionic path doesn't have a means of pop. assembly. They should let us summon Shroud spirits to do work.
 
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Looking good :) More interactivity on the bug tracker would be nice. Dev's have limited time obviously, but sometimes a bug report will hang around for weeks or months and never get an acknowledgement. That makes it hard to know if it's worth reporting again, or if it's not considered an issue etc.

On the unity side I hope that empires are made not to be so static. Pops have been king in stellaris forever, the downside to having an increasingly large population should be the difficulty in keeping a unified nation.
 
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So...I feel like this is just a repeat of last week's dev diary, i.e. 'This is what Custodians team does...look forward to the next update!'

Any news on when we will get some new game content, not just vague plans for existing mechanics overhauls?
 
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LystAP said:
That still won't eliminate the biggest issue with Spiritualism of pop. growth. Materialists have robots and cloning vats, while the Spiritualist Psionic path doesn't have a means of pop. assembly. They should let us summon Shroud spirits to do work.
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Spiritualists can still build robots, just at the cost of making the spiritualist faction less happy.

They don't have the advantage of clone vats or the 10ish assembly you can get from synth ascension, but they're not completely without the ability to assemble pops. And until a materialist empire finishes synthetic ascension (usually after 2250-2270 depending on tech rolls), a spiritualist empire can have just as much growth as they can. Lategame it's worse, but by that point (in SP anyway) the player has almost always won the game so it doesn't matter. Once any player empire eats their first neighbor they've pretty much won the game in SP, and that usually happens before any ascension path comes into play.
 
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Youtrack, bugzilla, JIRA and there are more than enough trackers. Mojang opened their issue trackers to the public well before they grew larger with the microsoft acquisation and it worked pretty well. I don't see how PDX cannot manage it. Come on, give it a go!
 
Woooooo! AI fixes? Yes, Please!
Limbojack said:
God, how I love the custodian initiative. After several years of development, all games would benefit from something similar. Well done. And I can't wait to see what the next update will bring to the game.
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Man. If only EU4 had something akin to Stellaris' Custodians. If only.
 
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I can't stress enough how much the Custodian initiative has changed my mind about Stellaris. I had paused all DLC purchases a while back, but since 3.1 I have grabbed all but Nemesis.

For me, the next steps for the Custodian team would be a more formalized partnership with the community. We have some champion community members (forget YouTubers and influencers, please) like @Pancakelord @Ariphaos @pmchem and others that lead thoughtful discussions here and/or have created amazing mods.

I would really like to hear that the Custodian team is bringing these members into the fold as advisors or mediators (should they choose to accept it).

Asking the Custodian team to query the whole community as a whole just seems ineffective and process heavy.

EVEOnline has a process of election for community representatives. Maybe we could borrow that idea (but likely much simpler and in a smaller scope) to elect these Custodian community liaisons.
 
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I wasnt having fun for quite some time about playing stellaris.

Thats changed with the lem update and the latest dlc

We plaied multi aswell with my friends whose left the game after big economy changes.

Stellaris is really a enjoyable state rightnow.

There are only few things left(for my taste)
-combat ai
-internal politics & empire sprawl
-unitiy and how it becomes useless after getting every perk
-market isnt dynamic (i guess its a work for stellaris 2)

Overall i really enjoy the game rightnow. I hope future dlcs diesnt introduce crazy things to help with the ballance
 
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Thank you to Paradox for the great support for Stellaris. After playing with the Lem patch, I finally feel that the game truly works, without bugs, bad AI and broken balance constantly breaking the immersion.

On Grand Admiral at least, the AI is managing to keep up pretty well on economy and fleet size, and more importantly, they are capable of actually fighting wars and being a real threat. No more fleets getting stuck moving back and forth inside their territory, no more being able to bait their entire armada around with a single corvette. They divide their fleets smartly and set clear goals for them that they follow through on, but they also have the wits to change their minds and turn back if the enemy gets reinforcements. Of course, it's still AI so it can always be exploited, but it's not such a simple matter anymore.

Hopefully the upcoming AI update aims to improve their economy and research further, and doesn't break the parts that are now working.

I also hope the Unity/Empire Sprawl rework won't simplify the game. With Marketplace of Ideas being locked behind Traditions, Unity buildings are now more worth going for and have their own niche. I don't want them rolled together with the admin cap buildings - there's already not a huge amount of decision making in what buildings to go for, so don't remove any more of it.
 
grekulf said:
If you have any thoughts, let us know! We are also interested in hearing if you have ideas on how you can organize yourselves in the community to promote ideas, bugs and suggestions for improvements.

Our primary ways of interacting with you are our forums, reddit and discord.

Future Custodian Updates
As we’ve mentioned before, we aim to release a new free update about every 3 months. These updates will sometimes be released together with a new DLC. The next update is scheduled for late November.
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Write a dev diary every 3-6 months that talks about the most upvoted suggestions and most upvoted or most reported bugs. If it becomes the first dev diary in each new three-month development cycle, all the better.

If an important bug isn't fixed but is being worked on, say so. You might prompt some good player feedback on what edge cases trigger the bug, and you'll avoid the impression that major bugs are being ignored.

Acknowledging good suggestions, either for their substance or for their presentation, is a good way to encourage similar suggestions in the future. If a much-requested feature can't be feasibly implemented, just say so. If popular suggestions do (or don't) mesh with your vision for the game, a quick explanation as to why will probably be well-received.
 
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Lovely as always! It is good to see the Custodians are taking things slowly but carefully. Can`t wait for the AI improvements, even the few little fixes that came with Lem were awesome, so I am very excited for the next patch.
 
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