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Stellaris Dev Diary #155 - Origins

Hello everyone!

I have just returned from a belated vacation in Japan, and although I had a great time there it is also fun to be back to work. Today I want to talk about some of the cool things happening with Stellaris this year. As many of you have probably guessed, Stellaris will announce a new expansion at PDXCon this year. This expansion will feature a lot of cool new things, most of which will be revealed at PDXCon. But I do also have something really neat that I want to share with you now!

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Good ol’ civics. Gotta love ‘em.

Back in Utopia we introduced a lot of cool new features to improve how you could customize and specialize your empire. Civics were a great addition to the game (in fact I consider them to be one of the best), but they are also awkwardly split between “backgrounds” like Syncretic Evolution and “institutions” like Distinguished Admiralty or Imperial Cult. Civics have added a lot of really cool options to how you can play the game, and that is something I want to expand upon – this is where the Origins come in.

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Materialistic, mechanist, mushroom madness?
Origins is a new feature that is very similar to Civics, and will now represent your empire’s background. An empire can only select one Origin, and an Origin cannot be changed. We will be adding a bunch of new Origins (some of them are really cool!) and we will also be changing some Civics into being Origins instead. Examples of Civics that will be converted into Origins are Mechanists, Post-Apocalyptic, Life-Seeded and Syncretic Evolution.

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Life-Seeded Origin, now open to hive minds.

Certain types of empires were previously unable to access some of these backgrounds since they have their own set of Civics (Gestalts and Megacorps for example). Because some of those Civics have been turned into Origins, those backgrounds will now be available to more types of empires. This means that it should now be possible to have a hive mind with the Life-Seeded origin or a Megacorp with the Mechanists origin. We know this is something people have been asking for for a long time now, and it’s really great to be able to add Origins to the game.

Like I mentioned earlier, we will also be adding a whole lot of new Origins that will add interesting starting positions for your empire. Right now we have 16 in the current version of the game, and we will probably see a few more until it's finished. I think Origins will be a great addition to the game that will surely help to facilitate a lot more player stories and player fantasies.

We won’t be showing all of these yet, but it will probably be immensely hard for us to not tease a few every now and then ;)

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Who isn’t curious about Remnants and Scions?

PDXCon is rapidly approaching and Stellaris fans will have a lot of cool things to look forward to! In two weeks we will be back again with another dev diary, where we’ll talk a bit more about PDXCon.
 
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I just want to say the art has been top notch lately. All the Distant stars relics/digsites etc were great and it looks like that's continuing. It's a small thing but it reallly matters!
 
I've been waiting for quite a while for this. Glad to see it being implemented.

My guess is remnants used to have an empire of their own, while scions used to live under a FE that abandoned them.
 
So we have 3 new origins shown:

Remnants
Scion
Prosperous Unification


My guess is that remnants is a relic world start. Prosperous Unification might be the current "Origin" of megacorps, which start with more normal pops, maybe the planetary unification tech gets unlocked for free too. Finally scion, that one is probably vasall related and indicates and empire that split away from a larger one.
 
we can already do this with the civic, so we probably will be able to when it is an origin

You already have the option to define their portrait and traits. I don't think the devs would take away that option, if it is changed into an origin. I hope syncretic evolution makes it possible to swap out the proles trait. I don't always want to play a syncretic empire that has default slaves. Maybe both species get along pretty well and formed an egalitarian society?

I'll freely admit I haven't played in like a year and a half, but when I last played their portraits and traits and even name were totally arbitrary. Should have checked if it had already been done before I asked, I guess.
 
How will pre-FTL species that become empires (either through natural advancement or an empire providing technological enlightenment) handle assignment of Origins?

Likewise, how will Origins be assigned to break-away empires from existing empires (e.g. if you release a vassal)?

I would imagine they'd have special origins specifically for those two cases.

So we have 3 new origins shown:

Remnants
Scion
Prosperous Unification


My guess is that remnants is a relic world start. Prosperous Unification might be the current "Origin" of megacorps, which start with more normal pops, maybe the planetary unification tech gets unlocked for free too. Finally scion, that one is probably vasall related and indicates and empire that split away from a larger one.

Prosperous unification is probably the default origin, but now with a few bonuses. It would make sense for say united Earth.
 
@IndigoRage - Its a bit weird because you had to go backwards in the empire builder.

My question regarding empire creation, can we get more choices for namelists and make it so changes to namelist data doesn't change the checksum?

Sometimes I want to mix and match my namelists, sometimes I want to play with new ones entirely
 
There should be an option for two species in the same star system but not the same world, like a planet and its moon both evolved intelligent life and the more primitive of the two was absorbed into the government of the other before FTL travel was developed. It'd be better for production and expansion, but you'd have an empire build on a union of two wildly different species so you'd get penalties to stuff like influence, and unity.
 
Origins is a new feature that is very similar to Civics, and will now represent your empire’s background. An empire can only select one Origin, and an Origin cannot be changed. We will be adding a bunch of new Origins (some of them are really cool!)
Does that mean other civics that can't be removed after game start would also become "origin"? You know, like Fanatic Purifiers, Barbaric Despoilers and Inward Perfaction?
 
An interesting idea, but I'm really uneasy about the idea of how this locks out stuff like Life-Seeded Mechanist.
This is literally not possible in the current game, so no, it's not locking anything.
 
An interesting idea, but I'm really uneasy about the idea of how this locks out stuff like Life-Seeded Mechanist.

The screenshots show that origins can have conditions (see Mechanist) so it's quite easy to lock certain types of empires out of a given origin.
 
An interesting idea, but I'm really uneasy about the idea of how this locks out stuff like Life-Seeded Mechanist.

You could only ever take those civics during Empire creation, and could never change into them, or out of them.
Origins feature does not change anything besides maybe not wasting a perk point when selecting those backgrounds.
 
The screenshots show that origins can have conditions (see Mechanist) so it's quite easy to lock certain types of empires out of a given origin.
You could only ever take those civics during Empire creation, and could never change into them, or out of them.
Origins feature does not change anything besides maybe not wasting a perk point when selecting those backgrounds.
The two of you are COMPLETELY misunderstanding.

Right now, today, it is 100% possible to be an empire that is BOTH Life-Seeded and a Mechanist.

With this change as shown, however, that will NOT be possible anymore.