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Stellaris Dev Diary #171 - Federations Stream

Hello everyone!

This week we’re back with another dev diary! I apologize in advance for it being a shorter one, but don’t worry, we aim to make up for it with a stream!.

Later today at 17:00 CET we will be hosting a stream over at Twitch where we will be talking about Federations and showing off all the features in more detail (such as all the federation perks). We will also be announcing the release date for the Federations expansion and showing off a cool new trailer!

If you have things you want us to show on stream, please don’t be afraid to mention them here!

See you on the stream!

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We announced that Federations will be released on March 17th!

You can watch the continued story trailer here:

You can also watch the VOD of yesterday's stream
 
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I would like to see, how to play pacifist, or "not war-orientied" with the new features! :)
 
Hello everyone!

This week we’re back with another dev diary! I apologize in advance for it being a shorter one, but don’t worry, we aim to make up for it with a stream!.

Later today at 17:00 CET we will be hosting a stream over at Twitch where we will be talking about Federations and showing off all the features in more detail (such as all the federation perks). We will also be announcing the release date for the Federations expansion and showing off a cool new trailer!

If you have things you want us to show on stream, please don’t be afraid to mention them here!

See you on the stream!

(This post will be updated with more information during the day)

Cool! I'm looking forward to it.

Personally, I am hoping for a bunch of balance changes. I'm sure you are aware that the community is not very happy with the fact that Hiveminds feel lackluster in terms of good and interesting civics. They perform poorly in multiplayer and AI games, so some buffs would be very appreciated. They play and feel just like a worse version of Machine empires. Apart from a reduction and amenities and Devouring Swarm, there are no interesting civics. Unlike Regular empires or Machine empires, which have all very cool civics that change the way you play.

Machine empires also start way too strong into the game, with a 5.5 Machine pop growth and adding another 1.5 organic pop growth ontop of it. I hope you have read our suggestions about nerfing Machine Empires and Synth empires. A total of 12.2 Synth pop growth and being able to add regular organic pop growth ontop if this is too much and makes every other option lackluster in comparison.

Could you show us the changes you have done to Hiveminds, for example giving them +1 Maintenance Drone on Housing District, adding Ministry of Production, making them eligible for the coolest events in the game like Horizon Signal, species self-modification, the Nivlac? What about bringing Robot factories, gene clinics, spawning pools to a reasonable level of pop growth, instead of having Robot Factories provide a flat 66% pop growth speed increase (in the form of 2.0 Robot growth) for only 1 job immediately?

Please do not forget that even before 2.2 you talked about makign use of the 2nd pop assembly window to allow the growth of multiple organic species at once. However, we never got this option. Instead we can only ever grow 1 organic pop and 1 robot pop. Are there any plans on finally delivering what you talked about before 2.2?

Could you show us how the new Admin cap mechanics work out for different kinds of empires? When reading about them I was sceptical. You introduce big penalties for Robots, but you also said Robots would have the best job at producing more admin cap. In my opinion too much pop growth is the culprit of a lot of balance issues for Machine empires and Synth Empires (see above) and I'm not sure if the admin cap changes will do anything about this.

I am also very interested in seeing an empire with lots of specialist slaves. I have already had ideas with new builds around empires focused on lots of slavery output bonuses, utilizing slaver guilds to create very strong specialist slaves. Could you show an example of this?

I am sure everyone was very happy when seeing the new tool to resettle unemployed and homeless pops automatically to new planets. This feature alone will make the lategame fun again, instead of creating an impossible to micromanage mess. Will this feature be available for everyone, even members not in the galactic community? I would be heartbroken to find out my Devouring Swarm can not make use of this feature because it refuses to join the galactic community.
 
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I know you disclaimed this in another dev diary... But i would really like to have the option of preventing another empire (AI and Player)to declare war on you by diplomatic measures (except genocidal empires of course). As long this option doesn't exist, warmongering will always win :(
 
Wew, so soon, thought it would be later in the day. Thanks!
You can also input your time zone on Google to get the exact time. For mine, I put in "1700 cet to est" and it gave me 11 am :)
 
It'd be nice if you could showcase some improvements on the AIs, and possibly show some mid-game gameplay ? Because so far the giant gamebreaking bugs that showed up in 2.2 and 2.3 only started becoming apparent around mid-game, and given their obviousness I assume your tests in an ongoing version never go past the early game due to the frequency of save breaking new builds coming out.
 
Things I'd like to see mentioned, in descending priority (i.e. most interested in comes first):

-AI improvements (with as many specifics as is feasible)
-Endgame crisis fixes
-Economy changes due to admin cap changes - how does the AI deal with it, what are the numbers like right now (they're probably final until release at this point, right? Right?)