Stellaris Dev Diary #290 - We Have Contact (3.7.2 'Canis Minor' Patch Notes)

[JageriuS]

Improved performance on some newer CPUs.

Can You elaborate? Is this related to the 3D Cache CPUs?

 

[Pancakelord]

The various modding changes to components look spicy. A few questions:

• Added documentation for the recently introduced localization grammar system.

What grammar system is this referring to?

• Added on_losing_station_control & on_gaining_station_control on action triggers.

Nice. This will make it easier to disable/re-enable dplatforms based on the rightful owner so enemies cant get a fully-reinforced starbase with a lucky shot on the starbase itself lol.
Does this only fire for starbase-stations? or for orbital rings (and juggernauts?) too?

• New Civics allowing early jump drive based exploration at the cost of starting without Hyperdrives:
  • Eager Explorers
  • Private Exploration
  • Stargazers
  • Exploration Protocol
• Added new `starting_potential` trigger for technologies, for conditional definition of starting techs.

How do starting techs interact with tech-cost-scaling? For example, i tend to play on 2.75x tech costs, as it's more in-line with pre-megacorp versions of the game.
Just wondering how painful it'll be with the new primitive-esque tech level civics.

• Added game rules to prevent building stations around certain planets/stars.

If I understand it right, it should be possible to (f.e.) ban building an outpost around a black hole, or neutron star, without an associated tech now?
Or, depending on the scopes of the game rule - it might be possible to ban building an outpost more than N distance (Euclidian or hyperlanes) from your homeworld, without some sort of society tech, as a way to slow down galactic expansion.

• Add 'on_destroying_[station_type]' on_action effect for when a research/mining/starbase/observation/etc station is destroyed.

Random question ive had in the back of my mind for a while, for any devs that might see this;
It seems to be possible to script an orbital deposit to be harvested by XX_orbital station type, and it seems to be possible to script in new orbital station types.
If I was to (for example) create a "+20 unity" orbital deposit that could only be harvested by a (modded) Temple_orbital_station, what would happen if I selected a construction ship and RMBed the deposit? Would the right-click context menu adapt automatically and show "Build Temple Station" (as it would for mining or science ones)? or is that part of the UI hardcoded, leaving no means to add modded orbital stations via constructors?

Last one, not related to this, but the question came up when I was digging through the files to try and figure out what that new localisation grammar system was referring to: I noticed the documentation on saved leaders (buried in the localisation folder of all places).

and it got me wondering...​

​

• can a saved event leader die if they are never activated?
• Like does the game track & update the age of a saved event leader?
• Or, if I make my 20 year old event leader, but dont activate them, and 40 years pass, will they still be 20 years old?
• And, if the game does track/update ages of un-activated leaders ... can they die of old age whilst unactivated?
• And, if so does it also take leader lifespan modifiers into account?

So many questions, for such an otherwise niche but narratively useful function (beats me saving dead ruler names for reference via army unit names lol).​

 

[velles]

Added a pre-FTL Deneb system.

So will it finally spawn in a normal game without Earth/Commonwealth of Man present? Also can we get Alpha Centauri and Sirius spawning near Sol if Earth is present in a galaxy as pre-FTL civ?
BTW it would be cool if pre-FTL species that repelled alien invasion would get a version of Payback origin targeted at the invader (so for example if you fail to invade the pre-FTL civ they'll target you instead of the MSI)

 

[kwheeler]

So will it finally spawn in a normal game without Earth/Commonwealth of Man present? Also can we get Alpha Centauri and Sirius spawning near Sol if Earth is present in a galaxy as pre-FTL civ?
BTW it would be cool if pre-FTL species that repelled alien invasion would get a version of Payback origin targeted at the invader (so for example if you fail to invade the pre-FTL civ they'll target you instead of the MSI)

That's a really clever idea.

 

[Rev-IX-]

What about directX 11?

 

[oreopirate]

I agree. I wanna do dumb shit sometimes.
Let me play my necro-hive micro-empire that just abducts pops from all over the galaxy or my organic reprocessing determined exterminator AI that just wants to build beautiful farms, but all those pesky walking (or swimming/flying) organics get in the way all the time.

Personally, I love turning my planets into kaleidoscopic messes as xenophiles, with more than a hefty dose of Xenocompatibility.

 

[Echo Candor One]

They're intended to be challenging, certainly more challenging than the Payback or Broken Shackles origins, but if they ended up being too difficult we can take another look at them

The other challenging origin also happens to be one of the best ones for running down a massive military victory. I suspect there will be the same sort of risk / reward with the new challenging origin.

 

[Idle America]

We need an "original template" for nerve-stapled species in Fallen Empires, so we can free them without taking the genetic ascension path. If the Fallen Empires' species can have an original template from before they unlocked psionics, why not their slaves?

 

[DaJay42]

Now if only we'd get a remove_technology effect so that we could design our own custom low-tech starts.

 

[moglus]

man, people want sliders and options for everything

While i understand this sentiment in general, i do feel like the espionage mechanic specifically should just be given an on-off slider like xeno-compatibility if the whole "some people would find it annoying to play against" is a design hill the devs are willing to die on. Espionage is just the latest of many "non-features" like rebellions, crime and piracy that have been so thoroughly defanged to please a subset of the player-base who refuse to accept any form of "loss" in a campaign, that they've effectively stopped happening to the player unless you purposefully play badly to force it to.

 

[Harkinian's Dinner]

Now if only we'd get a remove_technology effect so that we could design our own custom low-tech starts.

While more in-game options are always good, I believe low-tech starts are very easy to mod in, just by setting a bunch of starting techs to not be starting techs. I didn't expect the devs would ever implement any low-tech starting options at all, so I'm happy with what we're getting.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

While more in-game options are always good, I believe low-tech starts are very easy to mod in, just by setting a bunch of starting techs to not be starting techs. I didn't expect the devs would ever implement any low-tech starting options at all, so I'm happy with what we're getting.

Indeed, you can make use of the new `starting_potential` trigger for this purpose.

As an example, here's the script for hyperdrives

tech_hyper_drive_1 = {
    cost = @tier0cost3
    area = physics
    tier = 0
    category = { particles }
    start_tech = yes

    is_reverse_engineerable = no

    prereqfor_desc = {
        component = {
            title = "TECH_UNLOCK_HYPERDRIVE_1_TITLE"
            desc = "TECH_UNLOCK_HYPERDRIVE_1_DESC"
        }
    }

    weight_modifier = {
        factor = 1000
    }

    ai_weight = {
        weight = 10000
    }

    starting_potential = {
        is_eager_explorer_empire = no
    }
}

 

[SeraphAscending]

While i understand this sentiment in general, i do feel like the espionage mechanic specifically should just be given an on-off slider like xeno-compatibility if the whole "some people would find it annoying to play against" is a design hill the devs are willing to die on. Espionage is just the latest of many "non-features" like rebellions, crime and piracy that have been so thoroughly defanged to please a subset of the player-base who refuse to accept any form of "loss" in a campaign, that they've effectively stopped happening to the player unless you purposefully play badly to force it to.

No, fixing espionage is a way better option.
The reason for xeno-compatibility to be an option is because it can cause performance issues that are barely mitigatable with certain other settings. (i.e. large, highly populated galaxy) To my knowledge, a single larger empire taking the perk can absolutely tank the performance on weaker machines. So it's a performance decision and less a preference decision.

Espionage mainly just needs some bite AND counterplay. It also should never be allowed to be entirely untelegraphed. A whole fleet suddenly disintegrating out of nowhere would be terrible game design. - irrespective of the discrepancy of codebreaking/encryption
But what you could have is disrupting enemy fleet logistics that add a small modifier to ship upkeep or other stats. This could be stackable and really cripple someone's fleets. But it also MUST be possible to mitigate something like this - in success likelyhood as well as impact. Something like a multi-level "lockdown" policy that reduces diplomatic impact (diplo weight, trade deals, envoys, etc.) as well as some economic loss (slightly higher bureaucrat upkeep) but massively ramps up your resilience against such strategies. Or something like the option to run "investigations" after being hit by successful hostile operations that temporarily increase your encryption. So if you get hit by multiple in quick succession, you can quickly rake up the encryption bonusses (at a cost) to become much more resistent for the time being, so you can't just suddenly be hit by multiple enemies at once and completely crippled with no counter play possible.

Essentially espionage needs to be multi-step so that you might not know what your opponent is trying to do specifically in the long run, but you can preemptively take measures to hamper their progress and reduce their effectiveness. Then it becomes active strategy to use and counter espionage. The current implementation to largely reduce it to passive stats (codebreaking and encryption) and minimal impact is very unsatisfying and way too static.

 

[Shaeliss]

So, about that "we'll make great pets"... We're supposed to get it by Composer of Strands returning us to monke?

 

[ruhrbaron]

the patch looks fantastic but may I suggest a few more things:
- a search bar/ filter for the ship designer, scrolling gets old fast
- star base load outs: I don't wanna manually rebuild my nicely balanced composition of defense platforms, ideally that can be automated, also when upgrading starholds to citadels. Maybe through a dedicated staircase sector with a budget???
- more slots for starbases, ascension perks and planetary building slots due to more options
- make special planetary deposits survive the transformation to an ecu
- the ability to either build defense platforms in parallel or at shipyards
- all shipyards in a star system should be linked up into 1 virtual one since the construction scheduler is not particularly good at its job
- the cap on megastructures is silly, as if a k2 civilization would be happy with just one Dyson sphere when they can have all the Dyson spheres
- game performance

i see you've taken inspiration from the modding community for this patch, I very much am a big fan

It's absolutely wild to see how far Stellaris has come since the release, I've been playing since day 1 and the only thing I can really complain about is game performance but that's an evergreen but content and gameplay wise Stellaris has never been better

 

[DaJay42]

Indeed, you can make use of the new `starting_potential` trigger for this purpose.

As an example, here's the script for hyperdrives

tech_hyper_drive_1 = {
    cost = @tier0cost3
    area = physics
    tier = 0
    category = { particles }
    start_tech = yes

    is_reverse_engineerable = no

    prereqfor_desc = {
        component = {
            title = "TECH_UNLOCK_HYPERDRIVE_1_TITLE"
            desc = "TECH_UNLOCK_HYPERDRIVE_1_DESC"
        }
    }

    weight_modifier = {
        factor = 1000
    }

    ai_weight = {
        weight = 10000
    }

    starting_potential = {
        is_eager_explorer_empire = no
    }
}

Ooh, that's pretty cool.
Looks like it would need a compatibility patch with every other low-tech start mod in existence though, which is gonna be a pain in the ass.

 

[malakhglitch]

I am going to have to make and adapt to a while new (rp) playstyle with the advent of archaeotech and exploration protocols. Exciting!

 

[Pyzayt]

Added game rule to allow you to rename planets inside your borders even if owned by someone else.

Wait, other people can own planets inside our borders now? Is this specific to pre-FTL societies, or can we just have colonies in allied space now under some circumstances?

 

[malakhglitch]

Wait, other people can own planets inside our borders now? Is this specific to pre-FTL societies, or can we just have colonies in allied space now under some circumstances?

I believe that currently it's not possible to rename the planet of a pre-ftl civilization, so that might be what the fix is for.

 

[JonahsArc]

can't wait for this! my friend will be getting his first pc next week, thus he will be playing Stellaris with me and my brother for the first time!
I'm stoked for the update to Remnants, starting with the new Faculty of Archaeostudies instead of a normal research lab when you take the origin.
I will be running a Relic hunting RP build and will be waging all my wars for relics.. I neeed.. my Precious..