Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

[Jimmious]

You are not RK47

 

[Doma]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...v-diary-64-minor-features-and-tweaks.1004046/

Universal food hype!

 

[HAL 9000]

You are not RK47

If there is some other avatar available here with HAL's eye I will gladly change to it.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

crap, i know i have too many but i installed a bunch of new mods while i wait for the expansion and suddenly population raises by several units every month. in 1 month, maybe 2, i filled a 25 planet. and i haven't the slightest idea who can be the culprit =_=

 

[HAL 9000]

crap, i know i have too many but i installed a bunch of new mods while i wait for the expansion and suddenly population raises by several units every month. in 1 month, maybe 2, i filled a 25 planet. and i haven't the slightest idea who can be the culprit =_=

Normally if you have installed too many mods for disabling them one by one to be practical you disable a half of them and then check if the problem still occurs. If it does, you know that the culprit is in this half, so you repeat the process until you isolate the mod you're looking for. If the problem doesn't occur any more, then you check the other half.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

crap, i know i have too many but i installed a bunch of new mods while i wait for the expansion and suddenly population raises by several units every month. in 1 month, maybe 2, i filled a 25 planet. and i haven't the slightest idea who can be the culprit =_=

Normally if you have installed too many mods for disabling them one by one to be practical you disable a half of them and then check if the problem still occurs. If it does, you know that the culprit is in this half, so you repeat the process until you isolate the mod you're looking for. If the problem doesn't occur any more, then you check the other half.

thank you but i know math.

 

[Grotesque]

Here’s everything coming to Stellaris this April with the Utopia expansion and free Banks update
https://www.pcgamesn.com/stellaris/stellaris-utopia-expansion-free-banks-update

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is going to be a bit of a grab bag, as we're going to talk about features in the 1.5 'Banks' update that weren't quite large enough to get their own dev diary, but are still significant enough that we want to highlight them. All features listed in this dev diary are part of the free Banks update rather than the Utopia expansion. There are of course many other minor features, tweaks and fixes in Banks that did not make the cut for this dev diary but will be covered in the full patch notes once we're closer to release.


Empire-wide Food
Probably one of the most hotly requested features since the release of the game, we've changed food in 1.5 so that it is no longer local to planets. Instead, all food produced by planets goes into a 'global' food stockpile, which is used to feed the entire empire. The maximum size of this stockpile depends on your Food Stockpiling policy, and once your food stockpile is full, any additional food produced is instead converted into faster Pop growth across the empire at a rate relative to the size of the population (so an excess of 5 food/month will produce much more growth in a 10 Pop empire than in a 100 Pop empire). Conversely, if the stockpile runs out and food growth is negative, the empire will suffer starvation, halting all Pop growth and applying increasingly severe happiness penalties for all biological Pops.

Terraforming Candidates
As explained in earlier dev diaries, one of the decisions taken early on when it comes to terraforming in Stellaris is to not have every planet be terraformable. This is both for practical reasons (a Stellaris galaxy can contain thousands upon thousands of planets, and having them all be inhabited would be completely unfeasible from a gameplay perspective) and thematic ones, as we want habitable worlds to feel rare and special. However, this means that one of the great staples of sci-fi - terraforming Mars - isn't possible in Stellaris. To resolve this, we've introduced a new type of anomaly called a 'Terraforming Candidate'. Sometimes when surveying Barren worlds, you will find ones that while they do not support life, could theoretically do so if you possess the right technology. Once you have unlocked the Climate Restoration technology, you will be able to terraform these worlds into habitable planets. Mars will always be a Terraforming Candidate, and you will be able to find randomly generated Terraforming Candidates when exploring the rest of the galaxy.

War Demand Costs
A frequent complaint about the mid and late game in Stellaris is that the warscore costs for taking planets simply do not scale well to the size of lategame wars. You can have a gigantic conflict involving dozens or hundreds of planets that results in only a few planets exchanging hands at the end. To address this, we've rebalanced war demands to still be quite expensive in the early game (when conquering a handful of planets is a significant increase in power) but added numerous ways to reduce the cost as the game progresses in the form of traditions and technologies, allowing for vast swathes of territory to change hands in late-game wars.

Stone Age Primitives
Having Stone Age primitives use a system of modifiers and tile blockers always felt a bit odd, owing to the fact that it is a legacy system designed before pre-sentients and later primitive civilizations were given proper Pops. For 1.5, we've reworked Stone Age civilizations to use the same systems as regular primitives, meaning they have Pops, can be studied and conquered using armies.

Picking Room Backgrounds
Another occasionally requested feature has been the ability to pick your own room background when designing your species, instead of having it automatically generated by your ethics. In 1.5, you will be able to select your room background in the Ruler customization screen. We've also added a new room background in a Hive Mind style.

That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about the new music and sounds coming in Banks and Utopia, as well as showing off the Music Player that will be included with the free update.

 

[L'ennui]

By the way the Star Trek: New Horizons mod has finally toppled Birth of the Federation and Star Trek Armada 3 (the Sins of a Solar Empire mod) as the pinnacle of strategic videogame Star Trekkery. Give it a try of you enjoy the show/movies!

 

[Sranchammer]

The Room Background feature is a game-changer.

 

[Jimmious]

Can't wait for the leaders with pinup girl posters on their background walls

 

[vonAchdorf]

Here’s everything coming to Stellaris this April with the Utopia expansion and free Banks update
https://www.pcgamesn.com/stellaris/stellaris-utopia-expansion-free-banks-update

I recently read from a by and large trustworthy person, that while the game was meh on release the updates / DLC and especially the upcoming DLC will make it great. Any Kodex Konsensus on this?

 

[Space Satan]

It's a Paradox games, Codex consensus is that they are good but only after two years of DLCs and patching.

 

[thesheeep]

... and then they become bad again because of too many changes in DLC and patches after another year.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i installed too many mods and i can't play anymore. now i can only wait for utopia and start again from scratch.

 

[Wilian]

Here’s everything coming to Stellaris this April with the Utopia expansion and free Banks update
https://www.pcgamesn.com/stellaris/stellaris-utopia-expansion-free-banks-update

I recently read from a by and large trustworthy person, that while the game was meh on release the updates / DLC and especially the upcoming DLC will make it great. Any Kodex Konsensus on this?

From my experience, Paradox games around here will never be worth of the money because of DLC support, despite people spending tens to hundreds of hours with each iteration of it that cost around 15 to 20 on average, excluding 3-5 discounts.

 

[Grotesque]

 

[Sranchammer]

Sad.

 

[Nahel]

I recently replayed Sins of a Solar Empire and it made me think of Stellaris. Unlike Stellaris, SOTS felt fresh and original with different playstyles and true changes between the factions. It is sadly too focused on micro, but the combat was more interesting and more tactical. Drones, super weapons, interesting technological choices.... Stellaris is just too safe and standard on everything. Except the initial events during exploration nothing is really interesting or game changing. Where are my experiences going too far? Pirates plaguing expansion? Adaptation? Balance between economical growth and military growth.... And a cap on mineral and credits so early in the game is a real example of all these problems. A games well designed should never enforce hard cap so early since you should always have something to spend your credits or minerals on. In other games you could rush buildings (MOO), buy interesting advisors, technologies....Here everything is bland in order to create an annoying multiplayer balance. Except there is no reason to play that game in multiplayer....

 

[Jimmious]

Well yes, if your goal is to play something with good space combat, then SOTS is much better. Stellaris is more focused on interplanetary politics and empire management and so on. Especially with the upcoming patch the direction is pretty clear.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

they're entirely different games.
what's next, comparing stellaris with elite?

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

I've pirated this game and played for about 50 mins, didn't find any actual meaningful empire management, just generic 4x busywork.

 

[asfasdf]

I have been playing this for a while and it has several issues:

- Overall design is weak. You depend a lot on RNG on early game which reminds of FTL and other similar poorly designed games;
- Combat is awful, the military aspect of the game has zero strategic value. Just throw your fleet against the other fleet and pray your ships choose decent targets;
- Random techs is one of the most retarded concepts I have ever seen. You end up missing on relevant techs simply because they didn't show up. I fail to see the point of such crap mechanics;
- Game feels a bit rigid on some things. Like, if you have a decent habitable planet nearby you colonize it. If you don't have it, you sit and do nothing. Terraforming usually takes a long time to be viable (that assuming you got the right techs on the random tech thing). If another player colonizes the planet first it's a bit of a bummer. Depending on the pops they put there, invading it is usually not worth it. If you can purge them fine, but if not it's just quite pointless. The game needs an option to barrage the planet from orbit until everyone dies (I assume you stop killing pops with bombardment after fortifications are down?). Planets far away are pretty prohibitive because of influence thing, which goes back to point 1: you need to luck out and start with reasonable planets nearby.
- Late game is boring. Really, not much to do after exploration phase is over.

 

[Hellion]

Combat is a bit trickier than simply "throw stack against stack" since ship customization plays quite an important role after a certain point, and using the auto-design feature from the ship designer is not the optimal way to deal with all enemies. Some may stack armor and ignore shields (or vice versa) and you have to research and equip the proper weapons that damage shield or armor more. Fleet composition also plays a greater role compared to v1.0 last year, e.g. using cheap Corvettes to soak up damage while your Cruisers do damage to the enemy ships, or various other tactics like that.

Apart from that I agree that late-game needs work, as does playing a small empire that cannot or does not want to necessarily spam colony ships to expand. They plan to address these issues in the DLC that comes out early next month.

 

[asfasdf]

All the (rather small) depth they tried to add to the combat with the components effectiveness against each other disappears when the fleets merely fight chaotically against each other. It's all rather pointless. Long range ships should stick to the back and launch their torpedoes, not rush the enemy and die very quickly. So I have armor melting plasma destroyers. Good, except they waste all their time shooting against shield, instead of weakening critical unshielded ships. And so on.

Not to mention this rather simplistic rps mechanics have several drawbacks. It is like GalCiv games, it takes a long time to build a specialized fleet so, unless you have a very specific enemy in mind and can afford to build the fleet to counter it (and have the proper intel), you end up building something balanced and pray it works out in the end.

 

[Average Manatee]

Combat is a bit trickier than simply "throw stack against stack" since ship customization plays quite an important role after a certain point, and using the auto-design feature from the ship designer is not the optimal way to deal with all enemies. Some may stack armor and ignore shields (or vice versa) and you have to research and equip the proper weapons that damage shield or armor more. Fleet composition also plays a greater role compared to v1.0 last year, e.g. using cheap Corvettes to soak up damage while your Cruisers do damage to the enemy ships, or various other tactics like that.

Not really. I just spam plasma battleships and it destroys everything. The only game-changing modifier is armor, so use plasma that can beat armor and you're probably within 10-15% of peak effectiveness against all enemies.

All the (rather small) depth they tried to add to the combat with the components effectiveness against each other disappears when the fleets merely fight chaotically against each other. It's all rather pointless. Long range ships should stick to the back and launch their torpedoes, not rush the enemy and die very quickly. So I have armor melting plasma destroyers. Good, except they waste all their time shooting against shield, instead of weakening critical unshielded ships. And so on.

Actually you need torpedo ships to stay up close. At long range chances are the target is destroyed before torpedoes impact, and there's no Dauntless Guidance to keep them useful.