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Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary will be focusing on the road ahead after Cherryh and Apocalypse, and our long-term priorities going forward.

Cherryh Post-Release Support
As mention in last week's dev diary, the immediate priority for the team is post-release support for Cherryh and Apocalypse, fixing bugs, addressing balance/feature feedback, and working on quality of life and performance improvements. We are maintaining a running 2.0.2 beta patch which we will continue to update every few days or so until we are happy with the state of the game.

The Post-Apocalypse
Apocalypse and Cherryh were an expansion/patch focused almost exclusively on war, and with it out, we are now going to be moving on to other, non-war related priorities for future updates, expansions and story packs. To give you an idea of what's coming, we're going to revisit the list of long-term goals for Stellaris I made and updated for Dev Diary #50 and Dev Diary #69. This time, we're going to organize the goals into the ones we feel have been delivered on, old goals that were added to the list before 2.0, and new goals that we have set for ourselves after 2.0 (there is no prioritization difference between goals based on when they were added or whether they are considered old or new for this particular list).

As before, the list is NOT in order of priority, and something being considered completed NOT mean we aren't going to continue to improve on it in future updates, just that we consider it to be at a satisfactory level.

As before, THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE OR FINAL LIST, NOTHING NOT ALREADY COMPLETED IS CERTAIN TO HAPPEN AND THERE ARE NO ETAS

Completed Goals
  • Ship appearance that differs for each empire, so no two empires' ships look exactly the same.
  • More potential for empire customization, ability to build competitive 'tall' empires.
  • Global food that can be shared between planets.
  • Ability to construct space habitats and ringworlds.
  • Factions that are proper interest groups with specific likes and dislikes and the potential to be a benefit to an empire instead of just being rebels.
  • Ability to set rights and obligations for particular species in your empire.
  • Buildable Dreadnoughts and Titans.
  • Deeper mechanics and unique portraits for synthetics.
  • Reworking the endgame crises to be more balanced against each other and the size/state of the galaxy.
  • Reworks to war to address the 'doomstacks' issue and make the strategic and tactical layers of warfare more interesting and less micro-intensive.
  • Superweapons and planet killers.
Old Goals
  • A 'galactic community' with interstellar politics and a 'space UN'.
  • Deeper Federations that start out as loose alliances and can eventually be turned into single states through diplomatic manuevering.
  • More story events and reactive narratives that give a sense of an unfolding story as you play.
  • More interesting mechanics for pre-FTL civilizations.
  • 'Living systems', making empire systems feel more alive and lived in
New Goals
  • Less micromanagement and more focus on interesting choices in regards to planets, the ability to grow planets beyond current fixed size.
  • Empire trade mechanics and trade agreements.
  • A galactic market where resources and strategic resources can be imported and exported.
  • Espionage and sabotage mechanics.
  • Improved galaxy/hyperlane generation with better placed systems and dangers.
  • More anomalies and unique systems to explore.

That's all for today! Over the next few weeks, dev diaries will continue to focus on post-release support. Feature dev diaries will resume when we have new features to talk about. Finishing off this dev diary is a screenshot of how we're reworking difficulty modes in the next update to the rolling 2.0.2 beta:
2018_03_08_1.png
 
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I'm happy to see that planet management is a priority. It's honestly one of my least favorite parts of the game right now. After the early game, there's still so much click, click, click, click going on, even though I know some of the changes in 2.0 helped with all the clicking.
 
Hey, one question. 2.0 removed several techs from Machine Empires. Leading to them losing things such as a 15% cost reduction for edicts, 5% production increase for robots etc. Is there any intention to give them their own techs to make up for this?

Also the DE tooltip says they get -25% ship costs. Code says it's still -15% which one of the two is wrong?
 
Shouldn't the mode where the AI doesn't get extra bonuses be called something more like "normal" or "regular" than "beginner"?
 
Shouldn't the mode where the AI doesn't get extra bonuses be called something more like "normal" or "regular" than "beginner"?

It's a 4X. Symmetrical game mechanics give the player a huge advantage.
 
Glad Espionage is in the works. I really wanna be able to sink all this energy into supporting an enemy's coup. Let me be Space America!
 
Hey, one question. 2.0 removed several techs from Machine Empires. Leading to them losing things such as a 15% cost reduction for edicts, 5% production increase for robots etc. Is there any intention to give them their own techs to make up for this?

Also the DE tooltip says they get -25% ship costs. Code says it's still -15% which one of the two is wrong?

I'm going to add a couple society techs that give Hive Minds and Machine Empires substantial resource production boosts in the mid-game.

I believe the DE tooltip is fixed in the beta.
 
I really hope that governments/leaders get some attention in the diplomacy update. There's really nothing interesting, mechanics-wise, separating the government types other than how frequently your ruler gets replaced and some differences in available civics. Leaders themselves aren't remotely memorable or interesting; they're just +10% research-speed guy #2 or whatever.
 
Shouldn't the mode where the AI doesn't get extra bonuses be called something more like "normal" or "regular" than "beginner"?
To call the AI incompetent is a massively generous understatement. They current get some economic benefits and they are still pushovers on the current normal. What you are asking for would better be described as "trivial" rather than "normal."
 
Well, we can't build dreadnoughts... :p

Titans/Colossi were actually originally called Dreadnoughts/Titans but we renamed them to avoid confusion due to Fallen Empire Titans.
 
Still hope someday warp and artificial wormholes will return.

Warp could only be a late-game tech or defensive starbases in border systems would become irrelevant (again) and we have the reworked Jump Drive in that area. Punching holes in space-time to create your own wormholes would be pretty sweet though.

Edit: Also, mods.
 
Scaling difficulty looks really interesting, I guess its a pain to balance properly, but I can imagine it would be quite useful. Multiple levels of scaling difficulty would be nice too, at some point, I think.
 
Basically the way I see it, the goals can be organized neatly into three categories: Diplomacy/Espionage, Economy/Trade and Story Narrative/Pre-FTL.

Maybe we'll end up having an expansion/update focused on each of those? A complete rework of the economy with a trade system and new planet system would be almost 2.0 tiers of incredible... but I think that the diplomacy or story one will come out first.