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Stellaris Dev Diary #174 - Federations is out, now what?

Hello everyone!

Federations was released a little bit over a week ago, and we hope it's still giving you much joy.

There’s much to celebrate as the community has broken a bunch of records! We had 64-thousand people playing Stellaris on Saturday, which is the highest amount of concurrent players since its release 4 years ago. We want to thank you for the massive amount of support we’ve received with this expansion! We hope everyone has found this expansion as fun and enjoyable as us.

While you are busy enjoying the game we’ve been planning updates and working on patches. We are currently working on a 2.6.3 that we’re planning on releasing as a beta sometime soon. 2.6.3 should hopefully be the last of the smaller patches, as we will be switching focus to a somewhat larger free update in May.

The May update (TBA) will contain more bug fixes, but also a bunch of new things for you to play with. We are very interested in hearing your feedback and ideas regarding Federations, and if there was anything you would have wished for us to add. We are especially interested in feedback related to Resolutions and Federation Laws. Although I will not promise they will be added, I still wanted to leave some room open in case there were ideas that the community really wanted.

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Will you protect the Tiyanki or hunt them for profit?
We will give you some more information about the May update at a later stage, so stay tuned! Until then, keep enjoying the game :)
 
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That is an improvement that is already planned for the update :)

We will make it more clear how the votes went, and allow you to use favors

If it feasible, I need ways to use favors on my fellow members to get them to allow a new member in. So the spiritualist member maybe does not like the megacorp that I am trying to add and refuses to vote them in. Let me drop 25 favors on them and get them to vote them in anyway.
 
I'd love to see some things that allow you to really turn the galactic community to your advantage if you are on the council. Resolutions that perhaps give sole voting power to the council or ones that make the council have to approve of wars to not be in breach of galactic law.

Also please give us an option to rebuild the fourth ringworld section on the ringworld start, I don't care if you make it cost more or if I need to have all techs and things to build a ringworld I just really want the ability to not have a broken ring in my capital system when I control most of the galaxy.
 
Would it also be possible to show the DoW results as well? It's sort of annoying to have to go through opinion modifiers for something I should easily know as who voted for and against a DoW. Maybe some sort of popup window with a confirmation button to clear it, sort of like internal elections.

Yes, making votes more clear should apply to all federation votes.
 
Overall, I am quite impressed with Federations. The ability to cripple your enemies without going to war is something I want more of in this game. Origins are also a fine addition to the game.

One complaint I have about Federations is the UI of the Galactic Community. Currently, you cannot from a glance know what the current galactic law is, but you have to go to the resolutions tab - which is also a mess - to check. I think there should be some UI improvements for the Galactic Community. One thing I'd like to see is a separate tab in the Galactic Community where we can view the current galactic law.
 
Nice.

You’ll get more feedback on resolutions after fixing the bug that allows sanction resolutions to be re-peoposed meaninglessly - it cloggs up the order of business so much. (I looked for this in 2.6.2 notes but didbt find it mentioned)

Some wants regarding diplomacy, off the top of my head:
  • Allow envoys to be used for ”relation sabotage” between two other empires.
  • allow envoys to be used to smear another empire - reducing everyone elses opinion of them over time.
  • Make envoy impact on opinion / relations more dynamic - slow rate and lower cap if ethics are opposing, fast rate and higher cap if in harmony. (+other factors like trust, that have usually been flat +relations)
  • Make AI instigate more trade proposals (including favours!) and use the market more
  • Add more federation laws, maybe one new category per FED type?
  • Vassal interactions?
 
Hyperlane registrar is just a freaking joke now. Almost useless for regular empires and COMPLETELY useless for gestalts as they don't gather trade value.
Looking forward for improving this facility. There have been some great ideas for it like spreading speed bonuses several systems away or acting as a pseudo wormhole station.
Or just remove it from the game as it is an eyesore now.
 
It would like to see galactic resolutions that align well with Spiritualist, Authoritarian, and Xenophobic ethics.

To clarify, I can see the Xenophobe resolution chain being focused on improving the defenses of the individual (vs Mutual defense which is more group aligned).
 
This event is cosmic horror, the text isn't even supposed to fit or make any sense.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand what's happening in the Horizon Signal if you think its text "isn't supposed to make sense".

I absolutely DO NOT want Gestalts to get an unedited version of the Horizon Signal, so unless they get Alexis Kennedy back to write a version that fits for Hiveminds, they shouldn't get to do it.
 
A spiritualist resolution chain is definitely warranted - an end cap resolution where it grants +50% political weight for being Psionic would be neat.
 
Can you fix starting pop ethics by making them less random?
It isn't funny when you get 6 factions in one run and only 2 or 3 factions (that gives twice more influence than 6 factions) in another run with the same empire build and modifiers only because RNG.
 
For modders and mod users, the launcher has been an incredible pain, among the problems, invalid manifests, registry.json not updating its informations, etc.
And he support continue to pretend that everything is fine.
 
There should probably be some Spiritualist-leaning Resolutions for the Galactic Community, to counterbalance the Materialist-flavoured "increasingly unchecked research into Matters Better Left Alone" in the Unchained Knowledge line.

Or perhaps there should be both an "explicitly" Materialist AND Spiritualist line; the Materialist line could buff robot production and encourage greater automation, perhaps? While a Spiritualist line might focus on buffing Unity production and make automation/robots a breach of galactic law.

I, personally, would also LOVE if you expanded upon the themes of environmentalism vs. industrialization present in the Ecological Protection vs. Industrial Development chains... I think empires should have their own, individual policies along those lines, too, so we can decide whether we want to turn our worlds into polluted hellscapes or not without having to pass galaxy-wide laws to do so.
On Pollution, Stellaris Immortal has a wonderful pollution system that replaces amenities. Maybe take a look at that and see if it fits vanilla?
 
I haven't had the chance to play much with the galactic community yet, but here is some feedback anyway:

-> The effect of the Greater than Ourselves edict should scale with your number of planets, otherwise it's not enough to prevent lategame resettlement micro. Also, the fact that you need to pass egalitarian resolutions in order to get there is maybe an unfair nerf for authoritarians and genocidals, who would need another way to handle resettlement. This is especially important for synth ascended empires and determined exterminators, who can't use the normal migration system.

-> The mutual defense line is currently a bit weird, because if I am heavy militaristic, then +ship upkeep hurts me a lot more than someone with a smaller fleet, and a flat bonus to naval cap helps me a lot less than someone who has a smaller amount of naval cap to begin with. Honestly, I think this line of just bad currently, especially since non-genocidals usually join the galactic community anyway, so the total war cb doesn't do much. I would suggest to replace the +ship upkeep with +empire sprawl from pops, since the pacifist ethic provices -empire sprawl from pops and these resolutions are supposed to make the GC less pacifist. At higher levels, it could also ban civilian economy, just like the rules of war bans militarized economy. Also, make the bonus to naval cap a percentage based bonus instead of a flat bonus... Or maybe in addition to the flat bonus, to prevent pacifists from just not building naval cap. Also, maybe move the reduced war exhaustion gain from rules of war to mutual defense, it fits better there probably.

-> Genocidal empires (especially ones that are controlled by a player) should be able to be declared a galactic priority when they become big enough.

-> I agree that a resolution chain for spiritualists would be a good addition. This could do things like buff unity (particularly temples and priests), increase spiritualist ethics attraction, give bonuses to consecreated/holy worlds and give penalties to research and robot production. At higher levels, it could also ban things like full ai rights policy (which puts synth ascensed empires in breach of galactic law) and eventually also servitude ai policy and robots allows policy (which puts all materialists in breach of galactic law).
 
Congrats on a super successful update and xpac. The performance improvements and AI improvements have also gone a long, long way. I've had a great experience so far! More AI and perf improvements please, they make for much more lively games!

Some things I have seen discussed I too would also like to see, such as 'international waters' and a look at how pop growth works and taking another pass on the feudal empire civic (currently has incredible potential but kinda useless) and subject relations.

In the game I am wrapping up, there are some specific things I would like to see touched on:

1. I played an empire that got a tonne of pop growth from taking in refugee pops. Great, however they leave an incredibly unmanagable mess in the species menu and cleaning it up with traits I desired hurt the pace. I think one way to help this is to have each species entry collapsable, so that subspecies don't clog up the menu, in addition to a function that can assign a 'default' template at the top of the list that you can apply with a touch of a button to the dozens of entries clogging up the menu. If I want to tweak from what is available, then I can assign the 'new' subspecies as default, bumping the updated entry up to the top. Lots of scrolling is currently a bit of a weakness with some of the menues, and there's also a problem with the species menu where updating a template will bump you to the top of the menu, prompting more scrolling.

2. Psychic ascension needs a buff/redo. All the good goodies that path provides comes with a dice roll, and I lost most of them only attaining psychic engines toward the very late game and nothing else. They're very unsatisfying. It really does pale in comparison to bio and especally synth which is the current meta. I love psychic stuff and there's lots of nice flavour currently, and want it to have a more prominent role but currently it's incredibly lacklustre, inconsistent and the psycorp sucks. Even though bio ascencion is kinda boring to use, the traits it provides are pretty powerful and have an effect the entire time you have them just like with the synth perks.

Furthermore, please unlock the ability/event for the AI to unleash the end of cycle event for the added flavour!

3. Juggernaut is great, but it feels like it is coming too late for it to be super pivotol to a player that invests in it. At least that's my perception. In addition to that, the pacing of tech progression still feels quite off, where once you hit a critical mass of tech income, you absolutely smash your way through the tech tree, and head straight into repeatables quite early it feels, leaving other empires in the dust. For a while now, physics feels like a breeze to blow through and engineering has a really awkward staccato pacing, where so many different weapons pathways are loaded into it.

4. Can we get some more main weapon types for the titan class ships? I wouldn't say no to more unique weapon types like the null lance that you can get through events, etc in general as well. Flavour does so much for Stellaris!

5. Large defence stations, such as bastions and citadels need some large weapon slots on the main hull. I think they underperform as a defensive structure for the cost, and are kind of useless at their role, or my understanding of said role.

6. Would be great to see original precursor event chains converted to the archeology system!

7. Is it possible to get a bump in function to add a system to a sector that is just outside it's 5 jump initial control? I haven't used sector automation since the old one was taken out and replaced, so can't really comment on how well they function now otherwise. Going to try them out in my next run.

8. Rising levels of unemployment produce a lot of popup spam, where I click 'increase benefits'. Fact is, at certain points in the game, some level of unemployment is acceptable/inevitable and having the same window pop up for different planets, or the same planet (because it can fluctuate with circumstances) gets really irritating.

Something that is on my wishlist are more end game events, and crises added. I would personally like you to rip off 40k and make more use/add flavour to tomb worlds with a necron-like rip off :)

Loving the game again and my excitement for the future of Stellaris is back with the new update -- thank you for all the great work.
 
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An addition of hyper lane traffic congestion would be interesting. Not that it’s to affect play, but similar to the piracy problem between star systems have like a traffic cop ship to send on patrols, etc. and when traffic gets too much pop up window with tacky descriptions about ‘hyper lane rage increasing’ ‘our empire’s Hyperspace Traffic Authority is overwhelmed with recent civilian traffic, some wardens despair that accidents may get worse before a new patrol is arranged’ and accidents between two star systems with tacky, funny, descriptions, etc.

That’d be hilarious!
 
Can you tell us anything about the out of sync problems? Are you working on it?
The bug report section is full with people complaining, and me and my group can not continue any of our games past midgame (we play without mods).

It's kinda sad, Stellaris is one of my favorite games, the performance at least in singleplayer seems to be really good now, but in multiplayer it's just not playable. You should maybe just deactivate the whole multiplayer until the bugs are fixed, because its really frustrating to invest hours into a save which you can not finish or not even enjoy mid or lategame a little bit.

Edit:
The devs answered that the next patch will contain multiple OOS Fixed, didnt see it before. Thanks devs. At least I can sleep well now. Hope you catch the damn buggers! :)
 
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I have some things that I think could be in the may update, or considered for the near-ish future :)


Stances are a really cool addition, but there’s not a lot of Diplomatic incentive to them.

Different stances don’t have different preferences on deals. And some of the bonuses only indirectly affect diplomacy by adding diplomatic weight. So I’d like to change this up a bit. Expansionist is the most obvious one here, its only Diplomatic effect is border friction. Since the tooltip describes peaceful expansion, what if they also got cheaper Migration treaties and/or better immigration rates? Another is Mercantile - since they’re obviously all about trade - what if they also got cheaper Commercial pacts, and/or more trade value gained on both sides? All of the stances could get unique bonuses in this regard.



Maintaining positive diplomacy: Opinions shift. Empires change, our allies have changed over time, and were even enemies at some point or another. This should be reflected in the game in various ways. But there aren't many opportunities for this aside from Rivals.

Below, Diplomatic incidents have some ideas that could affect this, but there should be other things as well. Such as having one-way deals to prove that you’re trying to become an ally. Or actively maintaining trust with an Empire who has policies you vehemently disagree with. You can improve relations now with Envoys, so in the event you as an Egalitarian can make a really good deal with a Slaver society, you should have to maintain that deal by keeping an envoy there for example, just so trust and relations won’t start decaying. And there could be different kinds of trust caps as well which can also affect how well you can get along at a point given certain circumstances. You shouldn’t become BFFs for life just by waiting long enough. You have to work for it.



Diplomatic Incidents: Remember the Prince event? How about the one where you find a derelict cargo ship? We need more of those. Way more.

I would love to see a bunch of new events that can boost relations, harm relations, give influence/unity/pop happiness, potentially prop up new deals (or weaken established ones), and incite trade with other Empires. I’d like to see events where an Empire you’re bordering has ended a war, and you catch transmissions for help, so you can send them, minerals, food, and consumer goods to help rebuild, and they’ll give you favors and even diplomatic deals in return. Or you’re in a Federation, and you have slightly tense relations as they were forced in after a war, so you have various ways of dealing with them to relax tensions and prevent your federation from fracturing (remember the trailer?). Or you have a Rival so you seek to undermine them on the Galactic Community and along your borders if they happen to be there. There’s a lot of potential here.



Federation cohesion: cohesion right now only affects XP gained, which in turn affects centralization if it gets bad enough. I’d like it to have some more teeth. What if Diplomatic incidents temporarily affected cohesion, and you needed to do something to address, or further it? Or if higher cohesion led to bonuses in things like trust growth with members and lower influence cost (Federations with high cohesion could pay less influence per month, capped), while lower would lead to the opposite effects.



Federation projects and objectives: This is very important. Federations should be fully fledged groups where your members are actively doing things with each other.

This can borrow some of the UI and ideas from the GC, where you can propose, and vote on the next Federation objective. It should also go up with scale. A nice side effect, is that the voting weight aspect of Federations will become a much more important decision, will your Federation be democratic, or oligarchic/effectively dictatorial? It could also add in more vote types for different Federations. Trade leagues might favor those who have the most powerful economies for example.

So at first, you can get incentives that push towards things like certain technology and/or planetary development, mass terraforming/colonization, fleet exercises, and calls of war (so it’s no longer a surprise).There could also be emergency measures passed to help quickly rebuild other members after a war, or help bootstrap them if they’re generally struggling. And in the late game (with appropriate changes for this), you could even go for a Federation Gateway network - all members build gateways, to vastly speed up travel within a Federation (which could be given a cost discount), also dual owned megastructures, with its production split towards your members (This could make construction cheaper since building it consolidates resources). But it doesn’t count towards your cap, so you can build your own if you want full production. Though those last two might require a lot more work.
 
There should probably be some Spiritualist-leaning Resolutions for the Galactic Community, to counterbalance the Materialist-flavoured "increasingly unchecked research into Matters Better Left Alone" in the Unchained Knowledge line.

Or perhaps there should be both an "explicitly" Materialist AND Spiritualist line; the Materialist line could buff robot production and encourage greater automation, perhaps? While a Spiritualist line might focus on buffing Unity production and make automation/robots a breach of galactic law.

I, personally, would also LOVE if you expanded upon the themes of environmentalism vs. industrialization present in the Ecological Protection vs. Industrial Development chains... I think empires should have their own, individual policies along those lines, too, so we can decide whether we want to turn our worlds into polluted hellscapes or not without having to pass galaxy-wide laws to do so.
Or some Authoritarian vs the egalitarian Greater Good.
 
I would very much like to see more GC resolutions - and I mean not just more diplomatic power modifiers, but things that change how you approach the playing field. The interaction with cosmic wildlife in the screenshot is one such example, but maybe also things like an Interspecies Medical Exchange that can be given a focus (leader longevity, pop habitability, pop breeding speed) via resolutions? Also, building side-grades would fall into the category of things that change the playing field, and new buildings/districts that get unlocked via advanced resolutions.

Also, I'd like the resolutions to not force anything on anyone, but encourage the adoption of certain empire policies. That would, however, need to shift things like "ecology" and "militarization" to empire policy level ... which would be good, as it would re-enable a more "quality over quantity" playstyle, which is sorely missing right now (pop quantity is all that counts). This might need to be part of an internal politics rework, but please - give us the choice of quality vs quantity, don't force everyone to do quantity (of pops) :(

Furthermore, on the topic of Federations - essentially the laws present within a Federation determine the fleet contribution and how a successor is picked, the rest is just there to strongarm your position to effectively be the sole leader via your empire's strongest statistic - there's no reason to change individual treaties, and automatic migration is very much a toggle that you think about once and then never again. This feels very bland and makes me completely autopilot through it all. I would very much like Federations to be more like a mini-GC of sorts, with federation laws being locked by centralization levels - but this lock has to go both ways, there must be benefits beyond just Cohesion to staying decentralized. Laws that I'd like to see a Federation decide on for all members ... again, locked by centralization, and definitely not an exhaustive list: Refugees, Purges, Slavery, Resettlement, Population Controls.

In short, give us more friction possibilities with federation members that you have to (more or less) constantly keep in mind lest your precious Federation risks falling apart. Too often have I now just strong-armed my position into perpetual presidency, treating the federation like an extended, more competent, vassal swarm. This should not be easy, or even always the mechanically strongest, to accomplish (this seems fitting for a Hegemony, but not the other types). The Federations series of trailers shows a conflict of interests within a federation, but such a scenario can never unfold ingame because the mechanics aren't there to support it.

This is more a wishlist than anything, but the TL;DR is: More (and easier) playing field changes, and more internal conflict potential within Federations.
 
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