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Stellaris Dev Diary #216 - Changes to Necroids Content in the Lem UpdateJun 17, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone! As grekulf has mentioned, one of our key aims in the upcoming Lem update is to improve the value of our existing DLCs by adding new content to them. As part of this effort, several of our species packs have seen some love. This week, I will start us off by talking about some of the upcoming changes to the Necroids species pack. While we were overall very happy with the content that went into Necroids (indeed, it has set a high bar for our other species packs to match!), a few of us - both within the team and in the community as a whole - regretted a few of the missed opportunities. The Lem update has provided us with the opportunity to rectify this. Necrophage Hive Minds There have been quite a few calls for allowing Hive Minds to be Necrophages, and with Lem, this will now be possible! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/9703436/8d007a49d4e3374b47c816697d1a8b6f5c70bd8e.png They will work similarly to normal Necrophages, but with a few differences: Flavour texts that assume individual intelligences have been rewritten to fit the hive theme better Hive Minds generally cannot support non-Hive individuals within their empire except as Livestock, and Necrophage Hive Minds are no different there. However, unlike other Hive Minds, Necro-Hives will allow their Livestock to procreate. The Livestock can then be subsumed into the Hive via Centers of Elevation. Unlike normal Necrophages, Necro-Hive Necrophytes don’t use Consumer Goods. Instead, their upkeep of Food (or Minerals, if they are Lithoid) has been doubled. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/9703436/90033d5b30340e0cef39e0555c4c973ad2334bc8.png Like normal Necrophages, Necro-Hives can also use the Necrophage Purge to speed things up a bit. For this purpose (but in a change applying generally to all Hive Minds), Hive Minds are now allowed to purge Gestalt pops that are not of their main species again. Making Hive Worlds make sense for Necrophages is a bit complicated, as there was previously a hard block on non-Hive pops living there - the planet would eat them, effectively. The solution we are currently working on is to allow Necro-Hive specifically to bring their Necrophytes there. Just as you can combine Fanatic Purifier with Necrophage, so you can also be a Devouring Swarm (or Terravore) Necrophage General Necrophage Changes It has not escaped notice that Necrophages are quite strong. A lot of the things that make them cool and fun to play also make them very powerful, so it’s a fine line to tread on. However, we have managed to come up with a set of changes that bring them a bit more in line with other starts while maintaining the spirit of the Origin: Non-purging Necrophages no longer start with two extra pops than other non-standard origins (purging ones keep the extra pops because they are likely to lose a few pops through purging). The guaranteed primitive worlds may no longer contain primitives that have advanced beyond the Iron Age (previous limit was Steam Age), and will have more defensive armies than very...Stellaris Dev Diary #215 - "Gameplay Themes and Balance Considerations"Jun 10, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! First I want to thank you for the overwhelming support that you’ve shown us with announcing the Custodians initiative. It’s been really fun and motivating to see so many positive responses, and for that we’re truly thankful. At the same time, I must admit that it is also a bit scary in the sense that we shouldn’t have the expectation that this will suddenly resolve any issues you might have with the game, or that we’ll be able to deliver large amounts of significant changes with every update. Let’s appreciate this opportunity and make the best of it :) Species Pack Gameplay Themes Last week we already talked about what the Lem Update (honoring the author Stanislaw Lem) would focus on, but I’d also like to go into more detail regarding some things. We mentioned that we would be adding gameplay to the Humanoids Species Pack and the Plantoids Species Pack, and although I won’t talk about the exact details yet, I do want to talk a little about how we approached it, and the themes we chose. Plantoids was a bit easier, because there are some obvious fantasies. Going around the themes of growth and plants we’re adding some new traits, civics and origin. We felt like it made sense to open up these gameplay additions to both Plantoid portraits as well as for Fungoids. Humanoids was a bit trickier, because there are no direct fantasies that apply to them in general, so we instead chose to focus on fantasies that align with things like dwarves, elves, orcs or humans. The Civic we showcased last week was an example of how we made something inspired by a traditionally dwarven fantasy. Let us know about any ideas or thoughts you have regarding those :) We will be talking more about these in much greater detail later, but that may possibly be in August. Game Balance We’re going to take a look at reworking some of the major outstanding balance issues that we’re having. One example that I want to talk about is the issue with Research Booming, where power players can essentially outpace other empires due to focusing a lot on research. What enables this is usually Districts that provide Researcher Jobs, which is relatively easy to gain access to early on through Origins such as Shattered Ring or Void Dwellers (the latter not being nearly as strong). For Shattered Ring we are looking into changing the start from a pure “end-game” Ring World, to be more of an actual “Shattered Ring” that you need to repair before you gain access to the powerful Districts of the Ring World. Putting additional emphasis on the fantasy of resting this ancient megastructure to its former glory can be a fun addition to the Origin itself. Although we haven’t decided exactly what we’re doing, changing the start to be a Shattered Ring that you can restore with the Mega-Engineering technology is a likely route. Unity & Empire Sprawl Beyond Lem, we are also going to take a look at Empire Sprawl and Unity. The design for Admin Capacity was never really something that I felt worke...Stellaris Dev Diary #214: “The Custodian Initiative"Jun 3, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsGreetings! Today I am here to announce some very good news! Stellaris is not slowing down, but rather picking up the pace! We at PDS Green are very happy to announce our new “Custodians” initiative as well as the next free update, coming sometime after summer. The Custodian Team Stellaris as a game has been very exploratory, and the game has seen a lot of big changes over the years. I want to start by giving some insight into why we’ve chosen to focus on this initiative. As we’ve released more expansions we’ve had to take longer and longer between each release, as we’ve needed to spend more time on focusing on quality, making sure each release is as stable as possible. Paradox Development Studio also looks very different today vs. how it looked just a few years ago. Things take longer, there are more processes in place, and there are a lot more people involved. Because each release is now further apart, it makes it harder for us to address some of the outstanding issues that might be affecting the community between DLC releases. As we’ve added more content it's also been harder to polish and maintain all of the amazing existing content that we’ve added over the years. We want to keep creating new cool experiences for Stellaris, but we also want to be able to maintain a high quality for the base game itself, and for older content. What we have done now is that we’ve staffed up, and split the Stellaris team into two teams that focus on different aspects of the game. One team, that we call “the Custodians” team, will focus on free updates that we aim to release every 3 months, while the “expansion team” will focus on creating new content for the game. Examples of what “The Custodians” could be working on: Tweaking game balance Adding new content to old DLC Polishing existing content Bug fixes Performance improvements AI improvements Multiplayer stability UI and quality-of-life improvements This does not mean that the game will suddenly “be fixed” or done (whatever that means). Together with you, the community, we now have a better opportunity than ever to keep improving the game. In fact, I think working with the community is going to be crucial to really make this work well. We are going to need to improve how we communicate with each other, so that we can better understand each other. What “The Custodians” initiative is not It is very important that you understand that “The Custodians” initiative is no magic bullet or quick fix. We’re in this for the long run, and we hope you are too. We will need to manage our expectations and small, incremental improvements with more regular updates should be our approach. Honoring Stanislaw Lem The first free Update, the Lem Update, will be named in honor of the Polish sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem, whose 100th anniversary is being celebrated this year. Stanislaw Lem is famous for works such as Solaris, which has already inspired the Stellaris you know today. The Lem Update is currently scheduled for release some...Stellaris DD#213 - "Ship Previews Experiment and PDXCON Q&A Transcript"May 27, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone! Today I want to talk about two things - one is a new experiment that we are running for an alternative ship appearance browser in empire generation, and the other is the Q&A session that we held during PDXCon. Ship Appearance Browser Currently in Empire creation, when selecting the appearance of your ships, we display a preview of a sample ship utilizing your empire's colors. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/9703436/35c6382108ca2570e7d7d4997bee1ee96a02f707.png Current Ship Appearance Selection We have a bit of an experiment coming that will be rolling out to a portion of you soon that temporarily replaces this with an in-game ship browser that lets you switch between any ship and manipulate them so you can get a better look at them from different angles. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/9703436/97e51a4cb98f196ebd82ca006d752a0b92225f95.png Cropped 3D Ship Preview In our quest to constantly improve Stellaris we want to measure what impact a change like this can have, so that it would be easier for us to know how to prioritize these kinds of changes in the future. If everything goes well, the change will become permanent for everyone going forwards. If you end up in the trial, we'd love to hear what you think of it! PDXCon Q&A Transcript During PDXCon, we hosted a developer Q&A session on the PDXCon Discord server, with seven of us answering almost a hundred of your questions. It was a tremendous amount of fun and we hope to be able to schedule more of these. (Most likely on the Stellaris Official Discord server. Join us!) Here's the transcript of the questions and the answers, as well as a rundown of all the Stellaris panels and activities during this year's PDXCON. Next week we'll give an early peek at our autumn plans, after which we will take a break from dev diaries for the summer. See you next week!Stellaris devs "not done yet" with the game, "there's plenty of stuff to do"May 24, 2021 - Strategy GamerWhile Stellaris' PC incarnation may not have had any specific news to share from PDXCon Remixed this past weekend, it is celebrating its fifth anniversary this year. Launched in 2016 - the same year as Hearts of Iron IV - the sci-fi grand strategy game struck new ground for Paradox by tackling 4X game concepts, as well as being the studio's first foray into something that wasn't historical. During Stellaris' five-year journey so far the strategy game has gone through some major revisions. With patch 2.0 and the Apocalypse expansion, warfare, conquest, and FTL changes dramatically changed the pace and foundations of the game. The 2.2 patch completely reworked planetary economics and population mechanics, and the changes that accompanied the most recent Nemesis expansion were so game-changing that the developers decided to skip a version number and proclaim a new era with patch 3.0. We caught up with the dev team in the run up to PDXCon Remixed to get a sense of how they felt about the game at its five year anniversary. Older grand strategy games, such as Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV, faced increasing backlash against DLC packs and design decisions in the later stages, so we asked the dev team if they even wanted to go on for another five years. "We have so many different ways to expand," Stephen Murray, Stellaris' game designer told us. "Personally, yes, I would love another five years." Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: The best Stellaris mods Stellaris, Cities: Skylines, and Surviving Mars are free for PDXCon weekend Stellaris tech tree - everything you need to know Stellaris, Cities: Skylines, and Surviving Mars are free for PDXCon weekendMay 21, 2021 - Strategy GamerPDXCon Remixed 2021 is over, but the fun has only just begun. This year's show had plenty of announcements for everyone; from new expansions for Empire of Sin, Prison Architects, and Crusader Kings III, to the fact that those heroes at Paradox are actually making Victoria 3! There were plenty of smaller announcements too, with several games celebrating major events. Stellaris turns five this year and has sold over four million copies, while popular city-builder game Cities: Skylines is releasing new content creator packs which are available right now. Both are getting free play weekends to celebrate. Finally, Surviving Mars' revival plans are continuing apace. Step one involved talking to the new developers and releasing an annoyingly vague teaser image for the new content coming down the pipe. Step two involved the soundtrack coming to Vinyl? Step three is to also run a free weekend to get people excited about the space game once more. If you didn't catch PDXCon Remixed, an archive of the show's announcements should be available soon via Paradox's twitch channel. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: The best Stellaris mods Stellaris devs "not done yet" with the game, "there's plenty of stuff to do" Stellaris tech tree - everything you need to know Stellaris is free to play for the weekend along with a big Paradox sale ahead of PDXCONMay 21, 2021 - GamingOnLinuxParadox are running another PDXCON from today for the weekend, where we expect a new strategy game to be announced. To get things going Stellaris is free to play for the weekend and a big sale is on. Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/05/stellaris-is-free-to-play-for-the-weekend-along-with-a-big-paradox-sale-ahead-of-pdxcon Multiple Paradox titles free to play this weekend along with a big sale for PDXCONMay 21, 2021 - GamingOnLinuxParadox are running another PDXCON from today for the weekend, where we expect a new strategy game to be announced. To get things going Stellaris, Surviving Mars and Cities: Skylines are free to play for the weekend on Steam and a big sale is on. Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/05/multiple-paradox-titles-free-to-play-this-weekend-along-with-a-big-sale-for-pdxcon Play Stellaris for Free!May 20, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsPlay Stellaris For Free until May 24th! Get ready to explore, discover and interact with a multitude of species as you journey among the stars. Forge a galactic empire by sending out science ships to survey and explore, while construction ships build stations around newly discovered planets. Discover buried treasures and galactic wonders as you spin a direction for your society, creating limitations and evolutions for your explorers. Alliances will form and wars will be declared. An eternal cycle of war, diplomacy, suspicions and alliances await you. Defend or attack with fully customizable war fleets, where adaptation is the key to victory. Choose from an array of complex technologies when designing and customizing your ships with the complex ship designer. You have a multitude of capabilities to choose from to meet the unknown quests that await. Play for free today! Stellaris Dev Diary#212May 20, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone! Two big things this week. The first is that 3.0.3 has moved from beta to live, with the full details available here. 3.0.3 includes numerous economic and AI adjustments, bugfixes, and two new sliders in galaxy generation to control pop growth behavior without the need for a mod. The other is that PDXCon Remixed, an online adaptation of our annual convention, is kicking off! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/9703436/cb27528ebea073c1fd82eae3b5d6eff2f2591ef8.png We’ve had a variety of events including the Treasure Hunt and Grand Campaign (praise snek) over the past few weeks, but the main events start this weekend. I’ll list a few of the events of particular interest to Stellaris players, but the entire schedule can be found here. Friday, 21st of May: At 20:00 CEST, the Announcement Show will have all sorts of news and revelations, you can watch at twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive. (The pre-show event starts at 19:30!) Saturday, 22nd of May: At 01:10, Product Marketing Manager Pontus Rundqvist will be hosting a talk called Fanatic Egalitarians: Bringing Stellaris to Consoles with our friends from Tantalus, Producer David Giles, Designer David Doe, and Programmer Adam Clarke. At 20:00, the Paradox Awards show will be held, honoring the best community in gaming. Modders, community organizers, content creators and more will be highlighted and awarded for their amazing work with all our games. Sunday, 23rd of May: At 00:40, Community Ambassador Graeme “DJ Truthsayer” Crawford will host Defining Your Own Space: Making Great Stellaris Content, featuring some of the brightest stars of Stellaris content creation. ASpec, Enigmatic Rose, Old Man Mordaith, and Stefan Annon will give tips on making fun and engaging videos. At 02:10, DJ will continue with How to Conquer the Galaxy Without Really Trying, with QA Lead Joseph Gardener, Embedded QA Byron Aytoun, Regunes, UMAR, and Stefan Annon teaching you how to turn a fledgling empire into an intergalactic powerhouse! At 13:10, make first contact with some of the developers at Meet the Stars: Stellaris Dev Mingle on Discord. At 14:10, DJ will host Fanatic Xenophiles: Creating Character for Stellaris, featuring Senior Artist Frida Eriksson and Artist Emma Jonsson. See how our worlds are populated with a growing array of fascinating creatures. 14:55 brings us Fanatic Spiritualists: The Philosophy Behind Stellaris, where Live Content Producer Anders Carlsson grills Game Director Daniel Moregård, Content Designer Gemma Thomson, and myself (Game Designer Stephen Muray) about the stories being told through Stellaris, and how the game is designed to create those stories. At 15:45, the Fanatic Materialists: A Look at Stellaris Tech panel, featuring Tech Lead Lorenzo Berni, Senior Programmer Gustav Palmqvist, Content Designer and Technical Scripter Pierre Du Plessis, and Former Tech Lead Gwenael Tranvouez will share their insight on how the technology behind Stellaris is created. That’s not all, see the full list of events here ...3.0.3 Open Beta - Language UpdateMay 12, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHello Stellaris Community, As promised, we have updated the 3.0.3 Open Beta to include the missing non-English localisations that were not included in last week’s update. The new and updated localisations are now included in the Open Beta. Thank you for your patience and feedback! Stellaris 3.0.3 Beta UpdatedMay 7, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHello Stellaris Community! We would like to start off by saying thank you to everyone for your patience and feedback on the 3.0.3 Open Beta! We received a great deal of feedback from the Community, and, as we said we would, we’ve incorporated this feedback into our development plans moving forward. This open beta contains some missing and inaccurate localisations for non-English languages. These localisations are coming, but we feel it is important to get an updated beta out to our players for additional feedback as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience. You can opt-in to the beta by right clicking Stellaris, click Properties, Beta tab, and choose “Stellaris_test” from the drop down. One of the key pieces of feedback we received from the community was that the number of jobs was currently too high for the number of pops in the galaxy, and we agree. As such we have updated the job counts on a number of buildings and districts, including Clerks, Alloy Foundries and Consumer Goods plants. Higher tier foundries and consumer goods plants will now add flat bonuses to job output, rather than adding more jobs, they also are no longer mutually exclusive. This update to the 3.0.3 beta also includes some major changes to AI behavior that should improve the effectiveness of AI opponents. These changes give the AI a greater focus on economic stability as well as improving some research related behaviors. We are collecting feedback on how these changes feel for our players, so please let us know in the comments on this post. Population growth was the biggest Community issue with the 3.0 update, and we are exploring additional changes to this system. Some of these changes are long term initiatives, so in the meantime we’ve added Pop Growth Required and Pop Growth Ceiling sliders in the galaxy setup screen as quality of life features. These sliders will allow you to adjust the variables related to the bonus a planet can provide through logistic growth (pop growth required), and the amount of pop cost increases per pop in an empire (pop growth ceiling). This will allow you to get achievements and play in iron man mode in a way that feels good to you. Please note: changing these sliders can have major impacts on game balance and performance. As previously mentioned, this update contains some missing localisations for non-English languages. We will be adding these missing non-English localisations soon, and we apologize for any inconvenience. We expect to continue to iterate on these changes, and will be further refining economic balance and AI systems in future updates. Please leave feedback in the thread below on how the AI performs economically in the updated 3.0.3 Open Beta, and thank you again for your patience and understanding! Stellaris Dev Diary #211: 3.0.3 Beta UpdatesMay 6, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHi everyone! Thanks for the tremendous participation within the 3.0.3 beta branch and for all of the feedback that you've been providing. For those that are interested in joining the beta, you have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch. This week we'll be talking about some more changes that we're planning on pushing in the near future to the 3.0.3 beta branch concerning further balance updates, AI, and more. These are highlights of some of the things that will be in the full patch notes and not intended to be a comprehensive list. Bug Fixes and Further Balance Updates From fixes to the end of the Cybrex precursor chain to correcting edict deactivation costs, we've fixed a number of issues that you've found and reported during the beta. Thank you for reporting things in the Bug Reports forum. Regarding the economic changes, one of the common themes in the feedback has been that the sheer number of jobs in the game are too high, and we agree. Clerks are especially notorious for this, since in many cases you would rather actually see them unemployed and moving to a more valuable position elsewhere in the empire. We're taking some preliminary steps to reduce the number of jobs and changing things to focus on increasing productivity instead. Here are some of the changes you'll be seeing soon: Reduced the number of Clerk jobs provided by buildings and districts by 40%. Clerk trade value has been increased to 4. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/9703436/3bb5cf3da1cc7260dfbe041b296fdfaf1c2f8ae8.png Buildings that increased basic resource production and added jobs to basic resource producing buildings or districts (Energy Grids, Mineral Purification Plants, etc.) now increase the base production of the relevant jobs by 1 or 2 based on tier instead of their previous modifiers. Machine empires still gain the extra resource district slots as before. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/9703436/d335c0b2af53c1393f5e2070da8331a335c74427.png Yes, "Livestock" counts as a "Food producing job". (Or minerals, for Lithoids.) Manufacturing focus buildings (factories and foundries) no longer prevent the other from being built on non-Ecumenopolis planets, and no longer add jobs to Industrial Districts. They instead increase the base production of alloy or consumer goods producing jobs by 1 or 2, with a corresponding increase in upkeep. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/9703436/518042e56260ba3f8c287a7edba49ab26d3998b7.png Secondary resources like Alloys do require more inputs to produce more, however. Balancing the number of jobs and their output will be an ongoing task, expect future updates to have additional changes. AI Updates We're making some updates that will have significant changes to AI behavior that should improve the effectiveness of AI opponents, as well as some changes to reduce the impact to your empire if an AI were to take control of your empire for a short duration in multiplayer. These changes...Stellaris 3.0.3 Open Beta AvailableApr 29, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHello Stellaris Community! We’re pleased to announce the Stellaris 3.0.3 Open Beta is Now Live. This open beta includes changes to the new population growth system introduced in 3.0.1, to address some of the concerns raised by players about the population growth mid to late game. To opt-in to the open beta branch, right click Stellaris, click Properties, Beta tab, and choose “Stellaris_test” from the drop down. Please leave your feedback on these new changes in the the Pop Growth Feedback Megathread here We are always looking for feedback from our Community, and regularly incorporate community feedback into our future development plans. We hope you’re enjoying Nemesis, and thank you for your patience while we further refine pop growth. Stellaris 3.0.3 Open Beta AnnouncementApr 28, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHello Stellaris Community! We’ve seen a number of your reports regarding the pop growth mechanics included in the 3.0 Update. We’ve been reviewing this feedback, and including it in our post-launch support for 3.0. Here’s how we’ve decided to handle it: This week (date to be confirmed) we will be publishing an open beta that includes a revision of some of the population growth changes. The objective behind the changes introduced in the 3.0.3 Open Beta is to address some of the concerns raised by the community regarding mid and late game population growth. When the open beta branch goes live, you can opt-in to the beta by right clicking Stellaris, click Properties, Beta tab, and choose “Stellaris_test” from the drop down. We will do a further post when this branch becomes available. We are committed to gathering additional feedback and will consider incorporating this feedback into our development moving forward. We hope you’re enjoying Nemesis, and thank you for your patience while we further refine pop growth. Stellaris tech tree - everything you need to knowApr 22, 2021 - PCGamesNSo, you want to know more about the Stellaris tech tree? The idea of 'tech trees' is no stranger to space 4X games like Stellaris, but Paradox's vision for the concept is slightly more unusual. Instead of a static, known web of potential technologies like most strategy games, Stellaris adds an element of randomness. Stellaris' technology interface is split into three sections, one for each of the core disciplines of Engineering, Physics, and Society. You start off with three randomly pulled techs for each area, with built-in biases as to what techs you are shown. Every time you research a tech a new one is chosen at random, again, following certain biases. If you ever discover or unlock something via an event, it will also show up in this interface and stick there until you research it. This 'card shuffle' façade introduces a touch of the unknown to any individual run - you're never quite sure what techs will unlock in which order, although like a traditionally tree different techs are strung along a path which you'll need to follow towards the end. This means that, despite not being able to control what tech you get at any given point, you can still plan for your end goals. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Stellaris cheats - a guide to console commands Stellaris DLC - a complete guide Stellaris' 3.0 Dick patch isn't even out yet, and it's already been updated Stellaris Dev Diary #210: A post-Nemesis AddressApr 22, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! We hope that you’ve all had a chance to enjoy the 3.0 ‘Dick’ Update and Nemesis. We’ve had a lot fun making it, and it's been really fun to see your reactions to all the new stuff! We appreciate all the feedback and bug reports you have submitted, as it really helps us improve the game. 3.0.2 is looking to be quite stable as it currently stands, with better performance and a very low amount of out-of-syncs in multiplayer. There are still bugs and improvements that we want to make and the current plan is to fix bugs and make improvements for a couple of weeks more, until we can release a 3.0.3. For that patch we’ll be looking at things like: Some improvements relating to Operations & Espionage Tweaking and making improvements related to pop growth Various other improvements, balance tweaks and bugs We also know that pop growth has been a heartfelt issue for some of you, so we wanted to take this opportunity to address some of that feedback. With that I’ll hand the word over to our Game Designer Stephen to talk a bit more about pop growth in detail: "The Stellaris 3.0 ‘Dick’ update had a number of changes to economic systems, including major changes to population growth. We wanted to significantly reduce the number of pops in the galaxy and decrease the disparity of number of pops between empires with mass colonization and those with fewer focused planets, allowing smaller empires to keep pace to a degree with more sprawling empires. (The eternal struggle between wide and tall play.) As part of this, we made some changes to increase economic output of individual pops or other sources through various means - some technologies were buffed, edicts were updated, and new bonuses were added to keep production up. Some secondary resources, such as Research, are intentionally more difficult to rush, since we believe that in 2.8 it was a bit too easy to reach repeatable technologies and technological dominance. We do recognize that putting limitations on the previously endless growth can feel bad, and that the large number of sudden changes can be shocking. Internally, we’ve been playing with the system for months, and know that while it will take a transition period to get used to some of the changes, we believe that these changes are better for improving the long-term playing experience. That said, months of internal testing pales in comparison to a week of live play, and the feedback we’ve received from you have been integral for us to continue to improve the playing experience and has led to some adjustments we want to make. Balancing complex systems are an ongoing process so we encourage you to continue feedbacking here on the forums as we move forward. While we were interested in having more backwater planets in proportion to highly developed planets, we've deemed it too difficult to get to the higher infrastructure tiers. As such, we're planning on reducing the number of pops necessary to upgrade capital buildings to the higher tiers....[Dev Team] 3.0.2 Hot Fix Released (Checksum 91c1)Apr 20, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! We hope all of you are enjoying Nemesis, a lot of work went into this patch and expansion. Countless hours to bring you what is, in my personal opinion, one of the best and most stable releases in Stellaris history! However, regardless of how much effort you put into something being flawless, there will always be some small cracks that get missed. With this hotfix we hope to bring you a quicker patch of some of those larger cracks. This is intentionally a very small patch to make sure that we could get these specific issues fixed and delivered to you all sooner rather than later. Rest assured though that we have another patch in the works, so please continue providing us with feedback and bug reports (over at the Bug Forum)! 3.0.2 HOT FIX PATCH NOTES Bug fixes Fixed an issue with the Big Red Button achievement not triggering before the game ended. Fixed an issue where players couldn't play as the pre-scripted Human Empires. Fixed an issue with Criminal Syndicates branch offices producing super negative trade due to crime, then multiplying it because of crime. Known Issue: The Branch Office Breakdown tooltip for Criminal Syndicates does not include their planetary bonuses. The final value displayed in the UI is correct however. Before I leave you I want to address two other issues briefly. First, we've seen the reports about various graphical flickering issues, we're currently working on a fix for that but we couldn't get it into this specific hotfix. But we'll make sure to provide a fix for it as soon as we can! Secondly, I want to briefly touch on an aspect of the big economic rework we’ve done to improve the game – including the pop growth rebalancing. Please continue to give us constructive feedback and keep your messages civil, but don't spam random threads with hateful comments. Those will not be tolerated. We are continuously collecting your feedback and it will help us make tweaks to these complex systems. We are planning to address some of the feedback in the upcoming Dev Diary scheduled for Thursday! Stellaris cheats - a guide to console commandsApr 16, 2021 - PCGamesNSo, you want to know about Stellaris cheats and console commands? Much like you wanted to know about Victoria 2 cheats, EU4 cheats, and even Hearts of Iron 4 cheats, I imagine? It's ok, you're among friends here - we won't judge. With the recent release of the Nemesis expansion, Stellaris is in a pretty good place right now. Not perfect, but there's plenty of meaningful content across most phases of that game. But like all grand strategy games, the desire to have that perfect run is strong. Some of the best stories come from rolling with the punches, but when you're the hero of your own tale you sometimes want things... just so. That's where cheats come in. Stellaris has a console command feature that's common with many strategy games where you can input commands to achieve instant results. Sometimes this can be literal cheating, like giving yourself more resources or just hand-waving away a pesky rival, but there are plenty of debug commands and options to create nice visuals, like by removing the UI. We've compiled a guide to the essential commands to give you a smooth game. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Stellaris DLC - a complete guide Stellaris' 3.0 Dick patch isn't even out yet, and it's already been updated Stellaris: Nemesis review - begun, the endgame has Stellaris: Nemesis lets you now become a star-destroying galactic threatApr 15, 2021 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunWhat's galactic drama without an evil empire to rally against or a mighty hero to save us all? A bit of a damp squib. The latest Stellaris expansion, Nemesis, today spices up the end-game by offering extra powers for domination or liberation. It's got big Star Trek baddie vibes, enough that it even adds new ship designs which look like Star Destroyers. And as ever, the expansion is accompanied by a patch adding and changing loads in the 4X strategy game. Read more
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