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Stellaris Dev Diary #228 - New Content & Features in 3.2

Hello everyone!

For today’s dev diary we’ll be talking a little bit about a new wave of changes coming in the upcoming 3.2 update.

3.2 will feature some new content and features, some of which didn’t make it into 3.1, and some of which are new. The reason why I mention that is because I also wanted to shed some light on the process itself. With this new way of working, it’s fine if something isn’t done for a certain update, because it can simply spill into the next update. With our ambition of only having 3 months between the updates, it will not be long before the new piece of content will be out in the public. Speaking of which, the new Pompous Purists Civic is just such an example.

Pompous Purists Civic
This civic was designed to be added to the Humanoids Species Pack with our Buffing the Backlog initiative, but it didn’t quite make it in time to be released in 3.1. In 3.2 you will be able to try out this new addition to the Humanoids Species Pack.

The Pompous Purists Civic is a civic that allows for a diplomatic playstyle, but for xenophobes. The idea is based on an elven fantasy, where they are willing to negotiate with other species, but only as long as it's on their own terms.

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Friends? Maybe if you keep a respectable distance.

Ship Browser Experiment
Back in dev diary 213 we briefly talked about the improvements to a part of the empire creation process – namely the part of the UI where you select your ship appearance. The experiment meant that only about half of you got to experience those improvements, while the rest kept the ship appearance selection as it has looked like since 2016. The reason why we ran this improvement as an experiment is because we wanted to measure how successful doing these kinds of improvements can be.

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The Ship Appearance part of the empire creation screen allows you to browse different ship sizes and appearances.

The improved ship browser will be available to everyone with the release of 3.2.

Now I’ll hand over to Victor who will be talking a little bit about some new content for anomalies.

Anomaly Variety
Hello everyone! I am Victor, a Custodian Content Designer that you might have seen around on the weekly streams these past few months.

Back in 2018, we removed anomaly failure from the game. This meant that every single time you encountered the Gigantic Skeleton anomaly category, you would always get the Gigantic Skeleton anomaly, for it was the only one in the category. No longer! As one of my tasks for this patch, I decided to simply go through every single anomaly category and add new anomalies to orphaned categories that I could for the development cycle.

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This is not only limited to new anomalies, but I also revisited some old classics adding options to events that previous designers created before a lot of the resources we now use were added to the game.

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While this is not anything that will revolutionize the game, it is a great and interesting direction for a Custodian content designer to explore, which we are still establishing on the team. I do hope you enjoy your (slightly) more exciting and varied early game!

Terraforming Events and AI behavioral changes
Yes, hello, I am still here. My other task for this patch was to create a few varied random events for terraforming. These events vary in power and complexity and mainly break the monotony of pressing a button and getting a better planet. These bonuses vary from getting more districts of a chosen type to perhaps uncovering a dig site left by a species to enamored with war.

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Before you start thinking, you will sit there and terraform a planet back and forth between two different types and fishing for events. Do know that you can only get events the first time you terraform a world, and it’s never guaranteed. Terraforming is quite the unexplored space for Stellaris events, and these were a lot of fun to create.

Finally, @Caligula Caesar has managed to restore the AI’s terraforming hunger! Previously the AI needed to gather an absurd amount of energy credits even to consider terraforming, but that has now been rectified. The AI has been spotted changing and creating optimal planets in our internal testing. They also are more likely to pick terraforming techs and appropriate ascension perks in certain circumstances.

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That is all for this week folks! Next week we’ll be back with some exciting news!
 
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It's great to know that the event system is still being worked on. Having severely limited choices in a game supposedly about the endless opportunities of space was somewhat annoying, to say the least. It's nice to see that Terraforming will now be more involved as well, rather than being something you can forget for the next several years.
 
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These all look like really great changes!

I absolutely love going back over anomalies and adding new variations / options. I can't tell you how happy that makes me.

I am on a bit of a crusade at the moment about an issue I've noticed, whereby AI military fleets will constantly get caught in order loops. The reason it's so frustrating is because the military AI otherwise seems to be really competent and challenging, but this minor issue hamstrings them quite significantly. I have filed a Bug Report, but it didn't get acknowledged unfortunately.

Is this issue something that the devs are aware of?
 
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This looks very good!
Regarding Anomaly Variety - is there any chance that we might get the option to decrease anomaly frequency in the galaxy setup? I always feel like there are too many to actually pay attention and read them, especially since you know most of them already anyway. As a future direction, it would be good to buff them, but make them a bit more rare and add a timer, so you cannot ignore that mysterious signal for decades and them come back and it's still there.
 
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I don't mean this in a hostile way, i'm earnest in this question, what would be the reason for The Pompous Purists Civic. Besides being on better terms with other xenophobes is it enough of a bonus to be a whole civic?
 
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Have you given any thought to how terraforming candidates are generated? The way I understand it, later in the game after space has been explored the only anomaly type you get is terraforming candidates, so you get those all the time. Which leads to a huge number of them. Probably more than there should be. There are at least two mods that distribute such planets across the galaxy at the start of the game.
 
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Neat, adding options to terraforming and old anomalies is a nice little feature. Can we get a teaser for what next week will be :p

I am on a bit of a crusade at the moment about an issue I've noticed, whereby AI military fleets will constantly get caught in order loops. The reason it's so frustrating is because the military AI otherwise seems to be really competent and challenging, but this minor issue hamstrings them quite significantly. I have filed a Bug Report, but it didn't get acknowledged unfortunately.

Is this issue something that the devs are aware of?

To piggy back on this with my own crusade: automated planets significantly over-react to strategic resource deficit. I've had situations where a -1 leads to *dozens* of planets immediately building refineries. As they all come on line supply jumps to +dozens and minerals tank. I've reported this, with saves, and expanded on the information, but after weeks there is still no confirmation the Devs are aware. Would be good to get some acknowledgement (even if it's just "we don't have any plans for that atm")

 
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I must say the Pompous Purist is wrong. Isn't that diplomacy needs to be initiated by the empire having the civic, it's that the other species are boring and inferior :p
 
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To be honest, the Pompous Purists civic seems a little underwhelming.
There's not much going on there that really justifies to me spending a whole civic point on that.

As for the new ship viewer, it's good, but being able to pick a different ship set for each class of ship would be even better!
 
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To be honest, the Pompous Purists civic seems a little underwhelming.
There's not much going on there that really justifies to me spending a whole civic point on that.

As for the new ship viewer, it's good, but being able to pick a different ship set for each class of ship would be even better!

I really like the new civic! I like the idea of having a Xenophobe Espionage-focused empire and this opens up that possibility a bit more.
 
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Ideally if Anomalies/Special Projects are being looked at, then the annoying projects like the Gigantic Skeleton could do with being changed to being an anomaly proper.
Currently these Special Projects requires the tedium of finding the location they are at, finding the science ship that just discovered them and adding an order to the front of the order queue for said science ship to investigate the project. Instead of the event going through the Anomaly screen like so many others and allowing you to delay researching it with the sciencetist or giving the go ahead for the scientist to start researching the event.
 
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Does Pompous Purist work with Public Relations Specialists or Diplomatic Corps?

Also, I don't think I'm allowed to post on this forum without lobbying for Megacorps. Consider yourself lobbied.
 
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I don't mean this in a hostile way, i'm earnest in this question, what would be the reason for The Pompous Purists Civic. Besides being on better terms with other xenophobes is it enough of a bonus to be a whole civic?
I'd use it to easier get migration treaties as a xenophobe Lifeseeded Origin for instance, then later change it to something else.
 
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New anomaly changes make me super excited. I love anomaly stuff, and changing them up so the old ones feel different again is definitely something I approve of! Looking forward to it.

The terraforming stuff is also neat. I wonder if there'll be unique events for certain world types, like Hive and Machine worlds? Could be cool to see.
 
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Does Pompous Purists also stop other empires from trying to drag me into wars?
Stopping the desperate begging for migration treaties is good enough, but that'd be even better.
 
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