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Stellaris Dev Diary #195: Happy Holidays & Help Stellaris

Hello everyone!

We’re approaching the end of 2020 and we in the Stellaris team wish you the happiest of holidays! This year has certainly been a challenging one for many reasons, but under the circumstances we’re still fortunate to be working in an industry that has been relatively untouched by world affairs. All we can do is be thankful for what we have, and try to help those around us.

We’re also thankful for the many fans that support us and are excited for the things that we have in store for you all. There’s still a few months of development left, and starting next year our dev diaries will be showcasing the remaining features. I hope you’ll be as excited to read them as we’ll be about talking about them!

While Federations was about cooperation and order, our next upcoming addition to Stellaris is sure to provide a different experience. The fate of the galaxy may be in your grappling appendages, and to what end will you guide it?

Although those hints may be subtle, what I can unveil is the topic of the dev diaries we’ll be starting the new year with. Many of you have astutely noticed that we have been showing clear indications of Espionage being added to the game, and that is indeed what we’ll be talking about in the beginning of 2021.

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Work in progress. Game development is fun, and sometimes during development, unintentional circumstances can occur.

I won’t reveal too much about Espionage yet, but I can say that it will tie heavily into Intel and information gathering, but also other things. Similar to how we work with a lot of other systems (like archaeology), we usually combine the new game system with fun and interesting content. We don’t want a feature where you just perform an action and wait until you get a result – we want there to be events and random occurrences along the way.

Starting in the new year we’ll be talking about all of these new features, covering everything from spy networks, to operations, assets and how they tie into Intel. We’re very excited to soon be able to share the progress our team has made.

A lot of teamwork goes into making new features for a game, and each profession contributes to different parts. We’re currently looking for a lot of talent to add to our strength, so that we can keep improving Stellaris and making more new cool content. We have great ambitions for the future, and we need to bolster our ranks!

We’re currently looking for:
Senior Producer - Do you want to help us run our game projects?
Senior Game Programmers - Do you want to help us implement cool new features in the game? Do you want to help us with performance, AI or is something else your speciality?
Mid-level Game Programmers - Do you want to help us implement cool new features in the game? Do you want to help us with performance, AI or is something else your speciality?
Lead Artists - Do you want to help us lead our artists and make sure we can deliver the right assets at the required quality?
Tech Artist - Do you want to be the interface between our artists and our programmers? Do you want to help us create the correct tools so that your colleagues have an easier time with their tasks?
Senior Concept Artists - Do you want to help us add more cool things to the game? We need more people to help us draw things like space dragons, cool new ships or JEFF.
Senior 3D Artist - Do you want to realize the concepts drawn by your colleagues, and perhaps build ships or megastructures?

If any of those roles sounds interesting and well-suited for you, or if you know someone who might be, please don’t hesitate to apply!

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Our next dev diary will be on January 14th, but until then: Happy Holidays and stay safe out there! Happy New Year, and let’s make 2021 a great year!
 
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Will espionage abilities also be affected by the appearance of the species or organic/non organic/hive mind status of the involved empires? It would be rather difficult for a religious empire without robots to infiltrate determined exterminators or the other way around or infiltration of fanatic purifiers that have a different portrait unless one has the genetic tech to allow changing of appearance should be rather difficult... So some opposing empires should simply be difficult if not impossible to properly infiltrate without certain tech(s) unless they have your pops on some of their planets and not under the quicker purge types either.
 
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Starting in the new year we’ll be talking about all of these new features, covering everything from spy networks, to operations, assets and how they tie into Intel. We’re very excited to soon be able to share the progress our team has made.

sounds very cool !!!
 
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Will espionage abilities also be affected by the appearance of the species or organic/non organic/hive mind status of the involved empires? It would be rather difficult for a religious empire without robots to infiltrate determined exterminators or the other way around or infiltration of fanatic purifiers that have a different portrait unless one has the genetic tech to allow changing of appearance should be rather difficult... So some opposing empires should simply be difficult if not impossible to properly infiltrate without certain tech(s) unless they have your pops on some of their planets and not under the quicker purge types either.

Well, you could conceivably bribe citizens of the empire, or perhaps blackmail them into helping you. At least that's what I'm hoping for in cases like this. I would really hate to see gestalts and genocidal empires left out yet again from new content.
 
I fully agree with this. Espionage is more like getting intel about the other empires, how strong are they where are the colony worlds and so on. I won't mind the occasional sabotage or assasination mission but those should be hard, long tasks that happen only from time to time and would give you some sort of immunity as your security is up to their tasks after the enemy killed a governor.

Speaking of Espionage I'd like to to a Cato and repeat my biggest wish, no reveal of an empires homeworld after a first contact. Thats either up to the information policy or a very good espionage agency to determine where the homeworld is.

Do you have any plans to give the espionage against an empire a slight boost after you've occupied one of their colonies?
100 %
 
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My wish for 2021 is a covid cure and stellaris devs focusing on fixing and balancing already existing features instead of constantly adding new broken stuff.

I guess we would get rid of mask long before WoH fixed
 
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Wishing the Stellaris team a God Jul!

To be more cynical, it kind of sounds like almost the entire team is turning over, which I suppose explains why there hasn't been that much relative change in Stellaris versus the other Paradox franchises. I guess I'm hopeful that the job openings mean that there will be fresh blood and hopefully more Stellaris in the future.
 
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If any of those roles sounds interesting and well-suited for you, or if you know someone who might be, please don’t hesitate to apply!

What I would love to do is form an industry collaboration with Paradox Interactive. I think there are some legitimate research questions that could be interesting with respect to video game artificial intelligence. Paradox gets improvements to AI that would be both practical and effective (and I think from a marketing perspective being able to say that your AIs use real-world algorithms and were developed in conjunction with experts from the University of X is valuable). I get to publish papers. And I am dead serious about this. If this is of interest to you or the executives at Paradox Interactive then message me, and we can see what we can work out. I can send you my CV and some of my thoughts. To preserve my anonymity, I do not want to put such things in a post.
 
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Spy actions to forment unrest or alter population faction preference is maybe ok if there is a back and forth between the players involved (counter intelligence), but please no exploding starports at a button press. There's gotta be a way to fight back.

Very interested (and hopeful) to see if the espionage update will change how machine revolutions and resistance fighters work.
 
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Please tie espionage and intel closely to the ethics of both the target nation and originating nation. This should give us good flavor and keep things from happening that would not make sense based on one nation or the other's ethical disposition.

Great work and happy holidays!
 
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I am still not convinced a spy system is a good addition without a prior internal empire rework. Ethic drift within your empire, unrest problems, rebelling planets and entire sectors declaring independence as well as spies influencing your goverment could work really well, but the game doesnt have a basis for that yet. I doubt reworking that and adding a spy system is possible within the next major update. Otherwise spies can just gather information and do annoying things to the player, the later a lot of people dont want to be part of a spy system.
 
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Any chance you'd be interested in a very low level programmer who is willing to learn and try hard and knows how to google for minimum wage or so? Pls pls consider. I desire to assist.
 
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I feel like espionage has never really worked in a PDX game and I'm not sure that will change. EUIV is the closest but it's still a lot of micro without a ton of benefit, and I hate the system in Hoi4.
 
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well.... strafing attacks incoming ;)
 
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I hope Espionage is better than HOI4 espionage system. It was very underwhelm and limited. Paradox should hire bug fixer for all game not just artist and programmer. There too many bug.
 
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