Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today is the third week of post-Synthetic Dawn 'filler' dev diaries, as mentioned in Dev Diary 88. Regular dev diaries return on October 26th.

As we don't have anything in particular to talk about this week, I'm just going to give you another brief update on 1.8 post-launch support: We released the 1.8.2 update yesterday, with all the fixes from the 1.8.1 beta as well as some additional fixes and tweaks.

There has been a couple of script issues reported in 1.8.2 related to Devouring Swarms, Exterminators and Purifiers (missing tooltips and opinion modifiers) that we are going to look at and likely publish a fix for, but other than that we feel like we have now addressed all important issues reported in 1.8 and 1.8.1 and so will be wrapping up 1.8 post-launch support if no other critical issues are found in the live build.

As before, I'm going to sign off this dev diary with a screenshot, this one taken on the galaxy map in the internal development build, where everything clearly looks the same as it always has and there certainly aren't any significant changes being prototyped that I can't yet talk about. See you next week!

 

[henzington]

Thrilled to see the shrimp added

 

[Gratak]

Ah good, all the bug fixes are in so I can finally start playing.

*sees border screenshot*

This version sucks now, I'll wait for next version.

entered infinite loop...

 

[Garnrag]

entered infinite loop...

The cycle will never be complete!

 

[Gratak]

The cycle will never be complete!

Until the Reckoning appears.

 

[Riftwalker]

if you look closely at the top ones it looks like the borders are being drawn between systems... almost like they're following hyperlanes. At the bottom it also looks like he has a neighbor that he hasn't discovered yet pushing into his border.

 

[SolSys]

New border/frontier-system it is then!

Looks interesting, I'm quite curious about the actual mechanic though ...

Might be based on the design talk they did.

Edit: time-stamping doesn't seem to work here so jump to 18:52.

 

[skydiver1]

I think what we're seeing is empty stars projecting their own border pressure.
Which would be pointless unless they've made a move from dynamic to fixed borders, where each star and a section of the space around it represent a "space province" to be claimed.

 

[Creamu]

It would would be cool if borders were simply determined by claims (at the expense of influence). Could lead to some cool mechanics like border wars due to two or more empires claimng the same systems. Each side tries to flaunt their military strength over the course of a set amount of years (No fighting just naval excerises in claimed systems). Loser has to revoke their claims or just outright declare war over it. Or maybe each side doesn't want to risk war so for the sake of peace they both revoke their claim and it remains neutral space.

...A man can dream can't he...I mean historically that's what Russia did to Japan.

 

[Sergei M]

Martin Anward Hi. you can do what you do not do with the speed of the game. When the form of the galaxy is the maximum speed and when the system speed is normal and all this is automatic.

 

[Dan_Daniel2000]

Martin Anward Hi. you can do what you do not do with the speed of the game. When the form of the galaxy is the maximum speed and when the system speed is normal and all this is automatic.

What? Can you please explain what you mean with that?

 

[Gratak]

if you look closely at the top ones it looks like the borders are being drawn between systems... almost like they're following hyperlanes. At the bottom it also looks like he has a neighbor that he hasn't discovered yet pushing into his border.

This could indeed be true. That would explain the borders without the necessity of claiming every single system separately.

 

[Sian]

Well, Wiz did mention doing one of the 'early' Synthetic Dawn streams (... announcement stream?), that they were displeased with the current border format but wasn't entirely certain how to fix it, but that it was high on the list of things they would like to play around with.

Martin Anward Hi. you can do what you do not do with the speed of the game. When the form of the galaxy is the maximum speed and when the system speed is normal and all this is automatic.

I ... have absolutely no clue what you say ... I mean, I recognize that its all English words, but they don't make any sense...

 

[EntropyAvatar]

I do wonder what this means for all +border range buffs though.

Well, there will surely be a range component to the influence cost of claiming a system (range to capital, colonized planets, and/or existing borders), so +border range could significantly reduce the cost of claiming new systems. Or they might just switch all border range buffs to a straight discount on claim costs.

 

[Benefactorist]

Seems a kind of random "province" system, where a randomized shape is places around each star, and if your borders expand to that star you own the entire shape/province? Kind of like how there's already a semi-randomized shape/province system as shown in the sector system, making sectors and such.

 

[Philthy]

Martin Anward Hi. you can do what you do not do with the speed of the game. When the form of the galaxy is the maximum speed and when the system speed is normal and all this is automatic.

I think what you're asking is.

"Hi, can you change how the speed of the game works? I want it to change automatically from maximum speed at the galaxy view, to normal speed when I got into the system view. I want this to happen without me having to change anything in the top right corner."

Unfortunately, If I'm understanding correctly, I have to say. "No way." Because that would make Multiplayer have constant speed changes, which would be frustrating.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

Well, there will surely be a range component to the influence cost of claiming a system (range to capital, colonized planets, and/or existing borders), so +border range could significantly reduce the cost of claiming new systems. Or they might just switch all border range buffs to a straight discount on claim costs.

My assumption is that there will be a cap on how many Frontier Outposts you can build (either a hard cap like Core Systems or a soft cap through scaling costs.)

Effects that boost border range- civics, technologies, the Xenophobe ethic, etc- will likely give some sort of discount on Frontier Outpost upkeep or push the cap higher (by raising a hard cap or reducing the scaling of a soft cap).

 

[dtroiani]

I wish my borders looked that nice.

 

[Benefactorist]

My assumption is that there will be a cap on how many Frontier Outposts you can build (either a hard cap like Core Systems or a soft cap through scaling costs.)

Effects that boost border range- civics, technologies, the Xenophobe ethic, etc- will likely give some sort of discount on Frontier Outpost upkeep or push the cap higher (by raising a hard cap or reducing the scaling of a soft cap).

Maybe it will work like colonization in Vicky 2 where you invest points into a system and xenophobes and etc will grant you points faster?
Then, if you've put in enough points into a system, you "own" it, and can begin building stations/colonizing planets/ claiming adjacent systems?

 

[arc2611]

Which would be pointless unless they've made a move from dynamic to fixed borders, where each star and a section of the space around it represent a "space province" to be claimed.

A change I would welcome.

Right now, we have circular blobs, elliptical blobs, and vaguely crescent shaped blobs. It's not a proper map painting game if you can't make an empire shaped like a giant middle finger, damnit!

 

[Riftwalker]

Martin Anward Hi. you can do what you do not do with the speed of the game. When the form of the galaxy is the maximum speed and when the system speed is normal and all this is automatic.

ROGUE AI!