Development Diary - May 24th - Clarke Patch (v1.1)

May 24, 2016, 3:56 am

Hello everyone! As you may have noticed, there was no Stellaris development diary this week, because the team has been extremely busy working on the first free patch for the game, which we have named Clarke. Clarke is currently undergoing internal QA testing, and we hope to have a beta version of the patch out for you before the end of the week. Therefore, we decided to do a dev diary after all, detailing some of the fixes, changes and improvements coming in the patch.

Please note that the highlights below are just highlights, NOT exhaustive patch notes!

UI IMPROVEMENTS
A major target area for Clarke was the UI, particularly in regards to sectors and diplomacy. A few highlights:

Sectors can now be managed directly from the outliner.
Diplomatic Notifications are now much more detailed.
End of Combat interface has received a major face-lift.
Habitability icons/tooltips now show you more detailed information, including which worlds in a system you can currently colonize.

AI IMPROVEMENTS
Another major target area for Clarke was to address complaints regarding the AI, particular in sectors to sectors and warfare. A few highlights:

Greatly improved sector AI handling of pops, buildings, spaceports and mining stations.
Fixes for AI in end game crises.
Improvements and fixes to AI handling of its fleets.
Less restrictions on what the AI will trade and with who, especially in regards to border access.
In multiplayer, empires that are player-controlled will have a 'limited' AI for a period of 10 years if the player drops. The limited AI will not make any drastic changes to the empire, such as changing sectors, disbanding ships, declaring wars, etc, allowing a player to rejoin their empire pretty much as they left it.

We've also added a new option in galaxy setup where you can set the AI's overall aggressiveness.

EMPIRE BUILDER IMPROVEMENTS
We also took some time to add a pair of highly requested features to the empire builder. Namely, the ability to write a biography for your species and empire, and the ability to customize ruler titles. Ruler titles are customized separately by gender, and will remain even if you change government type, so long as the new government is of the same type as the previous one (so changing from a Monarchy to another Monarchy will not clear your ruler titles, while changing from a Monarchy to a Democracy will).

BALANCE CHANGES
While balance wasn't our main priority for Clarke, we nonetheless targeted a few major balance issues. A few highlights:

War score costs now scale to the size of your target, so you can take more planets from large empires but can't vassalize them in a single war.
The ability to stack evasion on Corvettes was nerfed.
Strike craft had their range substantially increased.
Ethics were rebalanced to make Xenophile/Xenophobe stronger picks, among other changes.
It is no longer necessary to control planets to demand them in war, but controlling planets that are set as wargoals are now worth more warscore.
Technology cost is now increased both by number of planets owned and size of population, instead of just population. Accordingly, the tech increase cost from population was lowered.

BUG FIXES
In addition to all this, Clarke naturally also includes dozens of fixes for bugs large and small. A few highlights:

Military Station maintenance is now correctly calculated (was far too high previously).
Numerous fixes to events, including fixing up the Old Gods event chain.
Fixed 'ghost' trade deal entries and trade deals silently failing when you traded above a certain percentage of your resource stockpiles.
Democracies that don't allow slavery will no longer get the Slaver mandate.
Difficulty settings are now available in multiplayer setup.

With Clarke almost finished, we're now switching over fully to working on the Asimov patch, as outlined in last week's dev diary[forum.paradoxplaza.com]. Where Clarke was mainly a fix and UI improvement patch, Asimov will target the midgame with new diplomatic features and event chains. More details about Asimov will be released in development diaries over the next few weeks, but if you have any questions about the Clarke patch, feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer.

Original Post[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

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Development Diary - QA in Space

May 30, 2016, 4:33 am

≫ Next: Update 1.1 Clarke is now live!

≪ Previous: Development Diary - May 24th - Clarke Patch (v1.1)

Hello everyone!

Today’s DD will bring a little light on QA work, and give a glimpse of odd and interesting bugs the team struggled with throughout the development of Stellaris. My name is Chandika, and I work as Embedded QA on Stellaris, alongside with Leo Larsson and Obidobi (partially). We are part of the Development Team, but we also have Central QA working with us. They are not assigned for any project for good, as they are working with all our titles.

For a deeper and detailed explanation on how Quality Assurance department works in Paradox Development Studios please check this[forum.paradoxplaza.com] Dev Diary written by Distantaziq, Embedded QA on Hearts of Iron IV.

Although QA job is not just reporting bugs and issues we find, this is what we are known for, bringing programmers to tears and despair. Also, it is the most visible part of our work, as you can see below.

The beginning

Very first bug ever that has been reported on Stellaris was, you could say, pretty important. Courtesy of MrNibbles, who found out that there was no Exit or Quit Game button present in game at all. Perhaps it was by design? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Jormungandur: "We didn't see a need for the player to be able to stop playing"

Migrating hair, clothes and other things

Throughout the life of Stellaris, many aliens seemed to have their own will to change looks. Some would say it’s the hottest spring/summer 2016 of the stellar fashion, and as a matter of fact, it wouldn’t be that far from true.

This Reptilian was called Fabalien in our QA team. We even made our own Emoji in the chat we’re using at work. It’s fabulous!

Scientists sometimes would change their clothes, depending on which alien empire they would encounter.

Socially awkward Molluscoid would creep through the window while having a conversation with you. Don’t make eye contact!

Naming your empire

Let’s say you wanted to name your empire with one letter. It would be a pity if it wasn’t visible on the map, right?

I mean, one letter can be easily missed in the vast Galaxy full of wonders.

You gotta make sure other empires treat you seriously, Q.

Space whales preparing for war

Purely a graphical bug where Space Critters, Whales and Amoebas decided to look a bit more intimidating than usual.

Instant rebellions

Look at this kaleidoscopic galaxy! It was a result of instant rebellions that AI could not handle.

Honorable Mentions:

Tough love of planets and their satellites.

Some Space Amoeba corpses would display in Galaxy View. And they are huge.

The epilogue

Of course, being a QA is not playing games all day and occasionally reporting something that made your playthrough unpleasant. We are most famous for the ridiculous screenshots we capture, but it’s actually just a small part of our job. Our responsibilities include (but are not limited to): analysing risks of the project, keeping track of our internal database of issues, which also means regression (verifying if the issues previously reported were fixed), and giving continuous feedback on the project (what works well, and what should be changed). We are doing a number of different tests that would narrow the issues down, check if all the features are in and working etc. We have scheduled multiplayer tests twice a week, as well as exploratory testing that would help us focus on long game.

All things considered, there is never enough testing for the project, especially games like Stellaris, where anything is possible. That’s why I would like to thank our dear betas for helping us out a lot and doing all sorts of testing for Stellaris. Without you it wouldn’t be the same! :)

Original Post[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

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Update 1.1 Clarke is now live!

June 1, 2016, 6:15 am

≫ Next: Development Diary - Asimov Patch, part 2

≪ Previous: Development Diary - QA in Space

We are proud to release the first major update for Stellaris. The "Clarke" update comes with various UI improvements and bug fixes.

See Stellaris Dev Diary #34 - Clarke Patch for some of the highlights.[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

Full patch notes can be found here![forum.paradoxplaza.com]

This update also unlocks the following content for free:
- Platypus species portrait
- Paradox empire symbol
- Symbols of Domination

↧

Development Diary - Asimov Patch, part 2

June 20, 2016, 8:53 am

≫ Next: Development Diary - New Skyboxes

≪ Previous: Update 1.1 Clarke is now live!

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today we will once again be talking about the Asimov 1.2 patch, that is planned to be released before the end of June. Last week's dev diary covered most of the diplomatic changes, here we'll be covering a variety of other changes and additions, though it will by no means be an exhaustive list. Full patch notes will be posted at some point before the patch is made available to the public, and include a large number of balance changes, bug fixes and UI improvements.

Better Looking Battles
One thing we were not quite happy with in the release of Stellaris is the way battles look - when small numbers of ships are engaged, it generally looks fine, but large fleet battles turn into disorganized heaps of ships, or 'beeswarms' as they have been described by players. A number of mods (such as the Beautiful Battles mod) emerged quickly to tweak this part of the game, and we've been looking at them for inspiration on how to improve the battle visuals. We plan to look more in detail at ship roles and fleet engagements in the future, but for Asimov we've made the following changes:
- The range of all weapons have been increased, so that fleets will engage at longer ranges and spend more time advancing at each other before close-up engagements happen.
- Combat computers were changed from Aggressive and Defensive into Swarm and Bombardment computers, to better describe their roles. Ships with Swarm computers will move in closely and engage, similar to old combat behaviour, and have bonuses to damage, speed and evasion. Ships with Bombardment computers will advance into weapons range and then slowly drift towards the enemy until they have range with all of their weapons, and have bonuses to accuracy, fire speed and weapons range.
- The default combat behaviour of ships was changed from that of orbiting 'swarm' mode into one where they make passes at the enemy and attempt to engage with 'broadsides', which should help make large battles look like less of an angry beeswarm unless all ships involved are using aggressive computers.

Map Modes
A highly requested feature ever since release has been the addition of more map modes, so that players can more easily keep track of things such as who their allies are, which empires they are at war with, or who has a positive attitude towards them. For Asimov, we've added a map modes feature with fully scriptable map modes that let modders at their own map modes, with three new map modes coming as part of the patch:
- Diplomatic Map Mode: Shows diplomatic relations with other Empires, such as whether you are at war, are allies with them, or are blocked from entering their borders.
- Opinion Map Mode: Shows their opinion of you.
- Attitude Map Mode: Shows the AI's attitude towards you.

Nomad Fleets
Another feature that we decided to expand on for Asimov is Space Nomads. A rather rare encounter in the base game, all they do is share contacts with other empires, and we felt they're an interesting concept that can be used in far better ways. Nomads are now a roaming fleet that can enter the galaxy sometime during the course of the game, and will then plot a course through the galaxy, visiting a variety of locations before they leave it again for destinations unknown. If they pass through your space on the way, they may interact with you in a variety of ways, such as offering to sell you some ships, or requesting permission to settle some of their people within your borders.

Slave Factions
As you likely know if you've been reading these forums, slaves were not intended to be as docile as they were in the release of the game, but rather we had to cut slave revolts for lack of time because slaves were completely unmanageable and threatened to make the feature entirely useless. For Asimov, we've reworked the Slaves faction into a pair of factions called the Docile and Malcontent Slave Factions. As the names imply, Docile Slaves are slaves that are relatively content with their lot in life, and will at most demand that regulations are placed on the worst excesses suffered by slaves, while Malcontent Slaves are far more riotous and will demand their freedom. There is also an Aboltionist factions that can be joined by free pops who are sympathetic to the plights of the slaves.

New Wargoals
Something that has been frequently requested is more variety in the wargoals you can use on others, so that war can happen for other reasons than simply to transfer territory. This is an area we'll be looking at fleshing out long-term, but for Asimov we've added at least a few new wargoals to spice things up:
- Make Tributary: You can now take tributaries in war. Tributaries is a type of subject that pays 20% of their Energy and Mineral income to their overlord, but do not join their overlord's wars and are free to declare their own wars and colonize planets.
- Abandon Planet: If you have Purge policies allowed, you can force an enemy to abandon a planet, killing all pops on that planet in the process.
- Humiliate: You can humiliate enemy empires, making them suffer a negative modifier and giving you a chunk of influence.
- Open Borders: Forces the other Empire to open their borders towards you for 10 years.
- Stop Atrocity: Forces the other Empire to ban slavery and purging.

Diplomatic Incidents
A big part of the aim with the Asimov patch is to make the diplomatic game more interesting, and have more interaction between neighbouring empires. Diplomatic Incidents is a series of events that can occur between empires which shake up relations, usually related to the actions of one empire towards the others. An example is that an empire might suspect that a foreign science ship surveying inside their borders is there to spy on them, and will demand humiliating assurances from the owning empire that their secrets are safe, or else close their borders to the 'transgressor'.

That's it for today! Next week will be the last development diary before we all disappear on vacation, and will talk about what the future holds for Stellaris.

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Development Diary - New Skyboxes

June 27, 2016, 5:11 am

≫ Next: Update 1.2 Asimov is now live!

≪ Previous: Development Diary - Asimov Patch, part 2

Hello everyone and welcome back to another Stellaris development diary! This week’s dev diary was supposed to be about future Stellaris development, but we decided to delay that for a week so that our Art Director Aerie can talk about some nice new graphical additions to the Asimov patch.

This dev diary will be a bit more technical and in-depth than most dev diaries.

One of the major changes that you will notice in the Asimov patch, is the changes to the background environment, usually referred to as the skybox. A major issue we had with these at launch was the lack of variety between system appearances. Since they all have the same skybox they more or less all feel the same. Systems have different amounts of planets, in different configurations, with different owners etc. but the skybox makes up for 95% of all pixels on screen, at any given time, so it is by for the most visually significant factor.

So, just make more skyboxes right?

Well, a problem with skyboxes, is that they are very expensive memory wise. They each “cost” about 12.5 megabytes of video memory. In comparison, all the UI in the game is about 90 MB. The memory cost is due to the texture being 12280 x 2048 pixels large. That is what it takes to cover a 360 degree environment all around you. And then you still look at the image at 150% magnification. Despite the size of these files, they are still fairly heavily compressed, and with the skyboxes we had, you could easily tell. Because of the size of the skyboxes, we were reluctant to add more.

What we could do however, was recolor them. We could use what is called a LUT (Look-Up-Table), where you use a reference texture to recolor everything. With this we can make all the adjustments we want in photoshop, using color balance, hue / saturation, levels, curves etc, and have this affect the textures in-game. LUT’s are a very powerful tool to change the mood of a game. LUT though, comes with a big drawback: it compounds the issue of compression artifacts even further.

Like I mentioned earlier, the skybox we had was not that good to begin with, it looked nice aesthetically, but quality wise, it was flawed from the very beginning. What we did when we created it, was we created a large panorama image of 4000x2000 pixels. This image was then wrapped around a sphere in maya, and rendered with 6 cameras each with a 90 degree field of view, to capture the information needed for the skybox.

But a 4x2k texture is not enough for a 12x2k skybox, we would have needed a 8x4k texture to start with, at the very least.

The problem went even deeper than this. Even before we rendered it, the panorama texture was created in photoshop by painting and stitching together clouds and nebulae using levels and masks. Because of this the texture had some banding issues, before we even imported it into maya, which is another step that degrades the texture’s image quality.

We considered for a moment creating a new skybox with the same technique as before, just with higher resolution, and better source textures. But working in 8x4k is very taxing on the hardware and as the layers would add up, even a good computer would start to struggle. Much more significantly, there were no guarantees that it would actually yield any good results.

So back to square 1. We needed to do something completely different.

We chose to try working with fluid simulation, using this to build an environment, and then simply render that out. We had only limited previous experience with fluid dynamics, but it's always good to try new solutions. Using fluids we could eliminate the entire first step, thereby removing a lot of texture degradation. Working with fluids in maya is surprisingly simple, and after some learning and simple tests we had a scene up and running that would give us roughly what we needed.

Before we added the new skybox to the game from maya, we did some additional work in photoshop to add more detail. So now we had a new skybox, looking similar to the old one, but of higher quality and with less compression artifacts.

For recoloring purposes though, this new skybox was still not enough. The recoloring still caused enough artifacts to make it unsuitable. We had more variation, but it was 3 steps forward, 2 steps back.

Talking to the engine team, one of the coders suggested using YCoCg compression. What this does is, instead of saving the colors as RGB (Red Green and Blue), it saves the information as luminance, hue, and saturation which works a lot better for the color shifts in our skyboxes. A fun aside is that YCoCg is not dissimilar to how human eyes actually process colors. Anyway, besides being a good way to lower the information degradation, it was a cool idea, so we had to try it. Getting that up and running was also fairly easy, and it did indeed produce good results. These new textures are twice as big, so 25 mb each, but with these textures covering so much of the screen it is totally worth it. If any part of the game deserves more graphical resources, it’s the skybox.

But it was still not enough. The thing that caused the most artifacts was drastical changes in hue, but we had to be able to move from a blue-ish green background, to a yellow, orange or red. So, instead of doing this change with the LUT- color correction, we do this in-engine in an earlier rendering step and then add a bit of color correction on top. This way, we can also subtly influence the colors of the ships, which makes them blend in a lot better. All in all, it produced a great result.

Beyond just changing the colors, we did want to do some more work to increase variety. We created some new skyboxes with different star densities, a dense one used closer to the core, a “mid-range” one which is similar to the one we had, and finally one for the rim, where the background stars are a lot more sparse and the skybox feels darker.

With these changes, each system will be a bit more unique, and it will be a be a bit easier to know where you are in the galaxy.

Original Post[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

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Update 1.2 Asimov is now live!

June 27, 2016, 7:24 am

≫ Next: Hotfix 1.2.1 Released!

≪ Previous: Development Diary - New Skyboxes

Today we are super happy to release the Asimov 1.2 update for Stellaris!
If you are feeling unsure what this update will bring to the table I suggest you check out the info-graphics below or have a look at our changelog posted here.[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

Related Development Diary
Stellaris Dev Diary June 27th - New Skyboxes[forum.paradoxplaza.com]
Stellaris Dev Diary #37 - Asimov Patch part 2[forum.paradoxplaza.com]
Stellaris Dev Diary #37 - Asimov Patch part 1[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

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Hotfix 1.2.1 Released!

July 1, 2016, 12:23 am

≫ Next: Stellaris Turns Over a New Leaf With Plantoids!

≪ Previous: Update 1.2 Asimov is now live!

We've released a hotfix for 1.2 that we hope will address most of the issues you have been having!

Changelog

Old versions are as always available under the beta tab in Steam.

Asimov update (1.2) Released post[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

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Stellaris Turns Over a New Leaf With Plantoids!

July 12, 2016, 7:55 am

≫ Next: We wouldn't leaf young hanging! Here's some plants to pine at!

≪ Previous: Hotfix 1.2.1 Released!

First Species Pack Coming Soon, Today Music and Words

A double-whammy of news today! First we are pleased to announce our forthcoming Species Pack, Plantoids. The Species Pack will contain fifteen new portraits, an original cityscape backdrop, and stunning new ship models. Watch this space for more news about that soon!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D9vT7Axs-E

Today we are also releasing for sale the original Stellaris soundtrack, composed by Andreas Waldetoft and the e-book Stellaris: Infinite Frontiers by Steven Savile, an original story about humanity’s first contact with an alien race and the questions this raises.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/492740/

http://store.steampowered.com/app/497660/

Stay tuned for more Plantoids news soon!

↧

We wouldn't leaf young hanging! Here's some plants to pine at!

August 3, 2016, 6:43 am

≫ Next: The Plantoids Species Pack is now LIVE!

≪ Previous: Stellaris Turns Over a New Leaf With Plantoids!

This is long over dew. Here you can finally see all our new fiber based buds!
The Stellaris - Plantoid Species pack releases TOMORROW (04/08-16)!

Which will be your first pick to branch out throughout the galaxy?

↧

The Plantoids Species Pack is now LIVE!

August 4, 2016, 6:41 am

≫ Next: Stellaris Development Diary - Heinlein patch (part 2)

≪ Previous: We wouldn't leaf young hanging! Here's some plants to pine at!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HCvgUCGdmc
You can get it right here!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/498870/

↧

Stellaris Development Diary - Heinlein patch (part 2)

August 15, 2016, 4:18 am

≫ Next: Patch 1.2.5 Released [checksum 328a]

≪ Previous: The Plantoids Species Pack is now LIVE!

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This is the second in a multi-part dev diary about the 'Heinlein' 1.3 patch that we are currently working on. This week's dev diary will be focusing on a series of changes made to ship design and fleets that we call the Fleet Combat Overhaul.

Dedicated Roles
One frequent critique of the ship types in Stellaris is that they don't really have roles - besides corvettes being unable to mount large weapons, there is basically no difference in what type of weapons can be mounted on what type of hull, meaning that there is no actual reason to use a proper mix of ship types - often the best strategy is just to find a single effective design (such as all-corvette fleets on release version or the currently popular destroyer tachyon lance fleet.). To address this we sat down and thought about what the roles of each type of ship should be, and came out with the following:

Corvettes are fast, agile ships that excel in taking out capital ships at close range.
Destroyers are screens for your capital ships that excel in taking down corvettes and countering missiles and strike craft.
Cruisers are close-range capital ship brawlers that tank enemy fire and engage enemy destroyers and capital ships.
Battleships are artillery and carrier ships that provide long-range fire support.

Somewhat simplistically, you could say that corvettes are good against cruisers and battleships, destroyers are good against corvettes and strike craft, cruisers are good against destroyers/cruisers/battleships (depending on how they are designed) and battleships are good against cruisers, other battleships and fixed installations. This change should give each ship a clear purpose, while allowing for some flexibility within by purpose through the ship designer (for example, cruisers can either be tough battleship killers or fast attack ships that clear the way for your corvettes depending on design). It's worth noting that designs may not start with a dedicated role like this - at the very start, corvettes not have torpedoes and destroyers will lack the targeting that makes them such effective corvette killers. Their roles instead come fully into play as technology advances and capital ships enter the stage.

In order to make this specialization possible, we have made a few changes to ship design. First of all, we have added three new weapon slot types:

Torpedo slots mount Torpedo and Energy Torpedo weapons, which are short range extreme damage weapons meant to take down capital ships. They can only be used by corvettes and cruisers.
Point Defense slots mount point defense cannons, which is the primary defense against missiles, torpedoes and fighter craft. Destroyers can be designed to field large amounts of point defense weapons.
Extra Large slots mount massive long-range weapons that can only fire in a fixed arc ahead, such as Tachyon Lances, Arc Emitters and Mega Cannons. These can only be mounted on battleships and take up the whole bow section.

We've also tweaked ship modules and retired a couple of modules that we feel did not fit the new design, so that it is no longer possible to make a 'corvette killer' battleship with huge amounts of small weapons, for example. While there realistically is no reason you couldn't mount small weapons on a battleship, going with a realism angle would simply put us right back where we are now, so we chose to sacrifice some realism for what we feel is better gameplay.

Utility Slot Rework
Another area we felt sorely needed some attention is the utility slots - right now there is often little meaningful choice, with the best strategy usually being to stack either armor or shields depending on ship size, enemy weapons and tech level. Most of the special utilities, such as shield capacitors or regenerative hull, are either woefully underpowered or extremely overpowered. To address these issues, we've made the following changes:

The amount of damage reduction provided by armor now depends on the size of the ship, so a single piece of armor will do more for a corvette than for a battleship. This should make armor useful even for smaller ships.
The 'special' utilities (crystalline hull plating, shield capacitor, etc) will use their own slot type that is limited by hull size, and so will only have to be balanced against each other instead of having to also be balanced against shields and armor.
A new utility type, afterburners, provides additional combat speed, allowing you to design ships that can closely quickly with your opponents.

Misc Changes and Notes

As part of these changes we're looking over the balance of every weapon in the game, especially strike craft, point defense and creature weapons.
Combat computers will be changed from being universal to being based on ship type, so corvettes have specific corvette computers that focus on boosting evasion, while destroyers have computers that impove targeting, allowing them to keep up with corvette evasion better than other ship types.
We're changing emergency FTL so that it sets the fleet as MIA, meaning that fleets that successfully escape combat will always be able to flee to friendly space rather than getting stuck and ping-ponged to death. To compensate, we're making it so every ship (no matter how undamaged) has a chance to be lost when you use emergency FTL, so it's always a risky maneuver.
We're looking into creating a special class of flagships that are limited in number by your fleet size, and are the only ones able to use auras, instead of all-aura battleship fleets.
We're looking at balancing the different FTL types and making it less hard to catch enemy fleets. Some of our current ideas is having fleet speed depend on how far away you are from friendly space (and thus resupply) and boosting the speed of warp.
We're looking into fleet formations and some basic orders during combat (priority targeting, etc). At minimum the basic fleet formation will be changed to be more sensible (no more suicide corvette leading the charge).

Note that the changes listed in this DD are not fully done, so some of them may not show up in below screenshots.

That's all for this week! Next week we'll talking about yet more features and changes coming in Heinlein.

Read the original post[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

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Patch 1.2.5 Released [checksum 328a]

August 16, 2016, 1:54 am

≫ Next: Development Diary - Heinlein patch (part 3)

≪ Previous: Stellaris Development Diary - Heinlein patch (part 2)

This is a small hotfix to address some common issues.

Please report any problems in the bug report forum[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

Click details below to see the changes included.

Changelog

↧

Development Diary - Heinlein patch (part 3)

August 22, 2016, 1:57 am

≫ Next: Extraterrestrial Thursday livestream on Twitch - 15:00CEST

≪ Previous: Patch 1.2.5 Released [checksum 328a]

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This is the third part in a multi-part dev diary about the 'Heinlein' 1.3 patch that we are currently working on. This week's dev diary will be about more miscellaneous changes and improvements coming in the patch, currently planned for release sometime in October.

Federation/Alliance Merger
When Federations were given the ability to vote on invites and wars, alliances became a bit of an odd duck in the Stellaris diplomacy. A middle layer between the 'loose' diplomacy of defensive pacts and joint DOWs, they ended up as little more than a weak form of Federation that's usually swapped out the moment the latter becomes available. In Heinlein, we've decided to retire alliances altogether and have Federations be the only form of 'permanent' alliance. When you unlock the technology for Federations, you will immediately be able to invite another empire into a Federation with you, 4 empires no longer being necessary to start one. Once a Federation has been formed, the technology is not required to invite new members or to ask to join it.

Federation Association Status
Another issue we ran into with the changes to diplomacy in Asimov is that Alliances and Federations had trouble bringing in new members - since non-aggression pacts, defensive pacts and guarantees were no longer possible with outside powers, building trust is difficult and you have to mostly rely on large bribes to get new members to join, something that just didn't feel right. To address this, we're adding a new diplomatic option to Heinlein called 'Federation Association Status'. This works similarly to an invite to the Federation in that it can be offered and asked for with any member of the Federation, but must be approved via unanimous vote. A country that has Federation Association Status is not actually a part of the Federation, but has a non-aggression pact with all Federation members and will gain trust with them up to a maximum value of 100. Revoking association status can be done via majority vote, or on the part of the associate at any time they like.

Planet Habitability Changes
The planet habitability wheel is a mechanic we were never quite happy with - it makes some degree of sense, but it's hard to keep track of how each planet relates to your homeworld type, and it ends up nonsensical in quite a few cases (Desert being perfectly fine for Tropical inhabitants, or Arid for Tundra, etc). We found that most players tend to intuitively divide planets into desert/arid tundra/arctic and ocean/tropical/continental, and so we decided to change the mechanic to fit player intuition. Instead of a wheel, planets are now divided into three climate groups (Dry, Wet and Cold) and two new planet types (Alpine and Savanna) were added so that each group has 3 planet types. Habitability for the climates now works as follows (numbers may be subject to change):

Habitability for your main planet type is 80% (as before)
Habitability for planets of your climate is 60%
Habitability for planets of other climates is 20%

As such, you no longer have to keep track of anything other than which climate your planet type has to know whether a particular type of world is suitable for your species.

We also felt that the number of habitable planets in the galaxy was too large overall, but that we couldn't really decrease it so long as the player only had access to 1/7 of those types at start, which would now become 1/9. We also felt the colonization tech gating could be rather arbitrary, particularly if you had a species suited to a particular planet type but still couldn't colonize it due to lacking the tech. As such, we've done away with the tech gating on colonization, and instead instituted a 30% minimum habitability requirement to colonize a planet. You will also be unable to relocate pops to a planet if their habitability there would be under the 30% minimum. With this change we've also majorly slashed the number of habitable worlds in the galaxy, though if you prefer a galaxy lush with life you will be able to make it so through a new option outlined below. We are, of course, looking into and tweaking the effects that having less habitable worlds overall will have on empire borders.

More Galaxy Setup Options
There is an old gamer's adage that says 'more player choice is always better'. We do not actually agree with this, as adding unnecessary/uninteresting choices can just as well bog a game down as it can improve it, but in the case of galaxy setup in a game such as Stellaris, it is pretty much true. With that in mind, the following new galaxy setup options are planned to be included in Heinlein:

Maximum number of Fallen Empires (actually setting a fixed number is difficult due to the way they spawn and how it's affected by regular empires)
Chance of habitable worlds spawning
Whether to allow advanced empires to start near players
Whether to use empire clustering
Whether endgame crises should be allowed to appear

Sector Improvements
Since barely a day goes by without a new thread on the topic of sectors and enslavement, we would of course be remiss not to deal with this particular bugbear. We intend to spend a considerable amount of time on the sector AI for Heinlein, but I'm not going to go into specifics on bug fixing/AI improvements but rather on a series of new toggles that we intend to introduce to give the player more control over their sector. In addition to the current redevelopment/respect tile resource toggles, the following new toggles are planned for Heinlein:

Whether sector is allowed to enslave/emancipate
Whether sector is allowed to build spaceports and construction ships
Whether sector is allowed to build military stations (this will replace the military sector focus)

We're also discussing having a sector toggle for building and maintaining local defense fleets, but we don't think we'll have time for it in Heinlein.

That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about Fallen Empires, how they can awaken, and the War in Heaven.

Read the original post[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

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Extraterrestrial Thursday livestream on Twitch - 15:00CEST

August 25, 2016, 6:00 am

≫ Next: The Fallen!

≪ Previous: Development Diary - Heinlein patch (part 3)

Live Broadcast: Come join us in wondrous universe of The Holy Radish Empire! https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive - 15:00CEST

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The Fallen!

August 29, 2016, 2:19 am

≫ Next: Development Diary - Space Creature Rework

≪ Previous: Extraterrestrial Thursday livestream on Twitch - 15:00CEST

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This is the fourth part in a multi-part dev diary about the 'Heinlein' 1.3 patch that we are currently working on. Additionally, from this point on we will also start to cover some features in an upcoming content DLC that will be released alongside Heinlein. This content DLC will not be a full expansion, but rather a smaller pack of events and scripted content focusing on a particular area of the game. Please note that everything mentioned thus far, and everything mentioned from now on that isn't explicitly marked as paid content will be free in the Heinlein patch. Details about the DLC such as name, price and release date will come in a future announcement. The focus of today's dev diary is Fallen Empires, who are about to receive a number of reworks, changes and additions.

The Fallen
Fallen Empires are my favorite part about the Stellaris setting. The idea of a precursor empire, milennia old, whose borders once stretched across the galaxy, their glory now faded, their great advancements forgotten, but the power of their ancient fleets and technology still far above that of any fledgling empire. Enigmatic actors on the galactic scene, whose morals and ambitions have been warped by ages of self-imposed isolation. For me, it invokes images of the Galactic Empire from the Foundation and the Vorlons and Shadows from Babylon 5. However, the implementation of Fallen Empires never quite matched my visions - originally meant to be completely passive, they were retooled fairly late in the development to give them some basic personality and goals as enforcers of particular taboos. While these goals make for some memorable experiences for new players (I've seen more than a few stories of careless colonization of Holy Worlds) they by necessity require Fallen Empires to behave in a highly predictable manner that, once understood, turns them back into actors of little consequence to the player. For this reason, fleshing out Fallen Empires and adding an element of unpredictability to them has been high on my priority list ever since I became Game Director, and this is what we're aiming to do in the Heinlein patch and accompanying DLC.

Sleepers Awake (Free Feature)
The idea of Fallen Empire 'awakening' was mentioned by Henrik Fåhreaus/doomdark a number of times during development as something we were interested in doing, but ultimately is something that ended up being cut for time. In Heinlein, all Fallen Empires will have a chance to awaken as a result of certain external factors. The exact conditions and chance under which each Fallen Empire will awaken depends on their ethos, but some examples include:

Endgame Crises threatening them or the galaxy
Regular empires growing too strong/technologically advanced
Other Fallen Empires being defeated by regular empires
Other Fallen Empires awakening first

When a Fallen Empire awakens, their personality, government and country type change. Their previous restriction on building ships, colonizing and conquering is lifted and they become what we call an Awakened Empire. Awakened Empires have one of the following four personalities:

Militant Isolationists become Jingoistic Reclaimers, and will try to conquer the galaxy
Holy Guardians become Doctrinal Enforcers, and will try to convert the galaxy to their faith.
Enigmatic Observers become Benevolent Interventionists, and will try to force all other empires into becoming a signatory to a galactic peace treaty.
Keepers of Knowledge become Watchful Regulators, and will try to force all other empires to accept their technological primacy.

Awakened Empires will start to rapidly expand, colonizing surrounding systems and conquering those races who will not submit to their demands. In each case, you will be able to avoid their wrath by submitting to them as a subject, with a special subject type for each of the four:

Jingoistic Reclaimers have Thralls, tributaries who may not colonize but can fight among each other.
Doctrinal Enforcers have Dominions, tributaries with enforced spiritualist ethics and government.
Benevolent Interventionists have Signatories, subjects who may not wage war, enslave or purge, but are otherwise independent.
Watchful Regulators have Satellites, who must pay a share of their research to their overlord and are required to ban all AI.

Once a Fallen Empire awakens, they will not stop until their galactic ambition is achieved or they are defeated by a coalition of lesser races. Only a few events will cause them to change their plans, such as the presence of an endgame crisis or the start of the War in Heaven (more on that below).

Personality Changes (Free Feature)
Among the four Fallen Empire personalities we created for release, two of them didn't really work out: The Keepers of Knowledge and Enigmatic Observers. The Holy Guardians and Militant Isolationists restrict you from a certain part of space - sure, that part may be a deliciously tempting size 20 Gaia World, but ultimately you can always find another place to expand. The Keepers of Knowledge and Enigmatic Observers, however, restrict playstyles - if you get one of the former in your galaxy, you can forget about having sentient robots until you're strong enough to take them on. As there's little you can do about this other than hope for the right type of Fallen Empires to spawn, it's not very fun and ultimately just limits player strategies in a rather arbitrary way. For this reason, we've decided to revamp the Keepers of Knowledge and Enigmatic Observers.

While not awakened, they will not concern themselves with restricting the overall actions of the 'lesser' empires: Instead, they will pursue specific goals and ambitions that sometimes require them to interact with these very empires. These goals and actions take the form of Requests and Demands: If you have established communications with Keepers of Knowledge or Enigmatic Observers, they will sometimes contact you and either give you a task (for example, to hunt down a splinter faction of their species or recover a cache of technology from one of their old worlds) or make a demand (for example, one of your pops for their 'galactic preserve'). Completing their tasks will result in an opinion boost and a reward (such as technology or perhaps even a Fallen Empire ship), while repeatedly rebuffing their demands may result in a declaration of war to put you in your place.

The awakened versions of these two will take on some of the characteristics of the old, non-awakened versions, with Benevolent Interventionists seeking to enforce galactic peace and Watchful Regulators trying to regulate the level of technological advancement in the galaxy. They will also act as the first line of defense against galactical crises, taking it on themselves to unite the lesser races against such existential threats.

New Designs (Free Feature)
A small detail that I felt was lacking in Fallen Empires was the absence of any unique designs. All the Fallen Empires used the same (fairly lacking) Avatars and Eclipses, and ultimately their ships were inferior to what a regular empire that had been around for a century or two could produce. Both of these issues will be addressed in Heinlein, with each Fallen Empire ethos now having their own unique designs to use (and build, if they are awakened). For example, Keepers of Knowledge exclusively utilize energy weapons to strike their enemies at a distance, while Militant Isolationists combine afterburners and projectile weapons to get up close to their foes and tear their ships up at point-blank range. Additionally, a whole new ship class called Titans has been introduced as a (for now) exclusive new weapon in the Fallen Empire arsenal. Titans are enormous ship, the equivalent of several battleships, extremely durable and armed with a vast array of lethal weapons. They will sometimes be found in the starting fleets of Fallen Empires, and Awakened Fallen Empires will be able to build a limited number of them.

The War in Heaven (Paid Feature)
We've talked about what happens when one Fallen Empire awakens, but what happens if there's two of them? For those with the DLC, two empires of opposing ethos (for example, Xenophobe and Xenophile) awakening can result in the War in Heaven event triggering. This event will cause the two Awakened Empires to go to war over the fate of the galaxy, dragging in the lesser species to fight on their side. All empires will be presented with a choice - join one of the two Awakened Empires and bet on their victory, join a league of non-aligned empires and hope you can stand against them both, or stand alone and risk being trampled underfoot when the war comes your way. Unlike a normal war, the War in Heaven is a cataclysmic event that will not end once a few worlds have been captured or a few battles won - it will be a fight to the death that ends only when one Awakened Empire stands victorious or both have been subjugated. If one of the Awakened Empires wins, they will show favor to those who supported them and be merciless to those who opposed them.

That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about some changes coming to space creatures, how they spawn and how they scale, coming in Heinlein.

Read the original post[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

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Development Diary - Space Creature Rework

September 6, 2016, 2:07 am

≫ Next: Ship Balance

≪ Previous: The Fallen!

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This is the fifth part in a multi-part dev diary about the 'Heinlein' 1.3 update and accompaying (unannounced) content DLC. The topic of today's dev diary is the changes to space creatures coming in Heinlein.

Grounding the Space Creatures (Free Feature)
I've always loved the concept of space creatures - massive beings capable of living in vacuum, travelling between the stars under their own power. With Stellaris, I felt that we went a long way with the addition and fleshing out of space creatures such as amoebas and crystalline entities, but we failed to really ground them in the setting. You encounter them, you research them, you get some information about them... but where do they come from? They're just randomly scattered throughout the galaxy, with no real sense of belonging or having come from anywhere.

This is something we've changed in Heinlein. Instead of just spawning randomly anywhere, space creatures will belong to a particular region of space. They can be found outside it, but its rare, so once you encounter more than one set of mining drones, it's likely that you've entered mining drone space. In the region of a particular space creature, in addition to finding the regular versions of these creatures, you will also find a 'nexus', a system surrounded by powerful variants in which a 'boss creature' lives, and where this particular space creature is meant to have either its origins or their 'home', so to speak. For example, in the center of mining drone space, you will find the Mining Drone Home Base, a powerful adversary that once defeated will yield some significant rewards.

Space Piracy (Free Feature)
Space pirates is another area where we just didn't go far enough with our implementation. Part of that is because we lack a real trade system for them to prey on, but even so, the one-off event that spawns a few ships (that may or may not look completely different from anything else your species uses) just isn't up to par. As such, we've decided to make pirates their own type of 'space creature', with a region of space they live in, a home base and several more variants of ships. From here, they will occasionally set out to raid interstellar empires across the galaxy until one of those empires has enough and attacks them at the source.

Power and Reward Rebalancing (Free Feature)
As part of these changes, we will also be looking at the power of each space creature, tweaking or creating more variants to ensure that they do not cease being relevant as soon as the player has built a destroyer or two. We will also look at rebalancing the rewards you get for killing and researching them, to make both finding and fighting them a more rewarding experience overall. The overall aim of our changes to the power and placement space creatures is to make encounters with them them rarer but more significant.

That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about Enclaves, a feature in the DLC that will accompany the Heinlein update.

Read the original post[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

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Ship Balance

September 12, 2016, 6:55 am

≫ Next: Stellaris: Leviathans announced!

≪ Previous: Development Diary - Space Creature Rework

Hello everyone!

Today we will go into the sixth part in a multi-part dev diary about the 'Heinlein' 1.3 update and accompanying (unannounced) content DLC. The topic of today's dev diary is the changes to ship roles and ship balance.

Ship Roles
The new design intends to give each ship a more unique combat role. Some ships will be defensive, while others will be more offensive.

Corvettes
Small and aggressive ships with high evasion that can be equipped with torpedoess. They will be very effective against large ships like battleships due to their high evasion and access to torpedoes. They have very low armor, but a very high chance to evade.

Destroyers
Defensive ships that are designed to counter corvettes, which is why they receive an innate +10 bonus to Tracking. They can be equipped with point-defense weapons, to shoot down the torpedoes fired by corvettes. They have moderate armor, and a moderate chance to evade.

Cruisers
These aggressive ships should be able to put out a lot of damage, but at the cost of less defense. Cruisers, like corvettes, can also be equipped with torpedoes. But unlike corvettes, they can also be equipped with hangars for strike craft. They have somewhat high armor, and a small chance to evade.

Battleships
The new role for battleships will be durable capital ships that fire at its enemies from a long distance. They are the only ship size that can be equipped with extra large weapons. They have very high armor, but minimal evasion.

Evasion, Tracking & Armor
A new feature in the Heinlein patch will be the Tracking stat. Each weapon will have a Tracking value that determines how effective they are against ships with high evasion. Every point of Tracking reduces the target’s chance to evade that attack by the same amount. Small weapons will have high Tracking, medium weapons will have medium Tracking, and large weapons will have minimal Tracking.

This means that large weapons - with a poor Tracking value - will still be very effective against large ships like cruisers or battleships, but almost useless against small ships like corvettes due to their high evasion.

The armor penetration of weapons has also been rebalanced so that large weapons have a much higher armor penetration values than smaller weapons.

In effect, this means that small weapons are good at shooting at small ships, while large weapons are good at shooting at large ships.

Another note is that missile weapons no longer ignore evasion, and can be evaded like normal. Most missiles, however, will have a very high Tracking value.

New Slots
Something new in the Heinlein patch will be the introduction of a couple of new slot types.

The extra large slot will contain powerful spinal-mounted weapons that are designed to target and take out enemy capital ships. Only Battleships will have a ship section with this weapon slot.

The torpedo slot, as evident by its name, will hold torpedoes. Torpedoes are slow firing weapons that deal massive damage, perfect for taking down larger ships. Unlike other missiles, however, torpedoes do not have good Tracking, which means they are very ineffective against ships with high evasion, such as corvettes or destroyers.

The auxiliary slot will hold components that have ship-wide effects. Crystal-Forged Armor, Shield Capacitors and Regenerative Hull Tissue are examples of components that will now be equipped in this slot.

Point-defense weapons now have its own slot size. The idea is that you should need to specialize some ships into countering enemy torpedoes

Major weapon rebalancing
Most weapons have been rebalanced to better suit the new design.

That's all for this week! Join us again next monday when we’ll be back with another dev diary!

Read the original post[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

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Stellaris: Leviathans announced!

September 15, 2016, 6:22 am

≫ Next: Enclaves coming in Stellaris: Leviathans!

≪ Previous: Ship Balance

Space is lovely, dark and deep, but it has secrets it wants to keep. Rich systems defended by fierce creatures, hostile pockets of resistance to your civilization, and the sleeping giants of the universe – the Fallen Empires who may yet be stirred from their centuries long indolence.

In Stellaris: Leviathans, the galaxy will be filled anew with adventure and challenge as your new and naïve space-faring empire comes face-to-face and ship-to-ship with a host of dangers and rewards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REijXUSQrQc

Guardians: Powerful space entities with mysterious origins and motives. Fight or investigate them to unlock technologies and gain access to great treasures.
Enclaves: Independent outposts of traders and artists who are willing to make a deal. Exchange resources, purchase information about the galaxy, or commission a great work of art for your empire.
War In Heaven: Where will your fledgling empire lie if two ancient Fallen Empires decide to renew old grievances in a War in Heaven? Will you err on the side of caution and take a side with the stronger power, or will you strike at both whilst they are occupied with their own titanic struggle?

Leviathans is the first Story Pack for Stellaris, Paradox Development Studio’s best-selling science fiction strategy game. With new events, new species portraits, new encounters and new options, Leviathans adds a lot of new material, including new music and sounds, to one of 2016’s biggest strategy hits.

Stellaris: Leviathans will be available this Autumn.

If you want to learn more about what is coming in Stellaris: Leviathans and the accompanying Heinlein patch, then check out the development diaries archive![forum.paradoxplaza.com]

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Enclaves coming in Stellaris: Leviathans!

September 19, 2016, 3:42 am

≫ Next: The Guardians

≪ Previous: Stellaris: Leviathans announced!

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This development diary will cover Leviathans, the recently announced DLC that will be accompanying the 1.3 'Heinlein' update. As previously mentioned, Leviathans is not an expansion but rather something we call a 'Story Pack', a collection of mostly scripted content that is larger than an event pack but smaller than a full expansion. Originally, Heinlein was supposed to be an update accompanying a full-fledged expansion, but we chose instead to do a Story Pack so that the Stellaris programmers would be able to focus on bug fixing, UI improvements and improving/reworking features in the free update.

The Heinlein update has already been exhaustively covered in several development diaries, but I still thought I should take the time to remind everyone of what it contains. Note that this is NOT an exhaustive list:

Awakened Fallen Empires
Fallen Empire quests, tasks and general improvements
Fleet Roles and new XL weapons
Weapon Balance rework
Federation Victory Condition
Strategic Resource Rework
Auto-Exploration
Rally Points
Expansion Planner
Habitability System Rework
Federation/Alliance Rework
Federation Association Status
Better control over sectors
5 new portraits (NOT the 'cuties')
Major sound and graphics improvements
Space Creature rework, including new art and encounters
Loads of bug fixes, AI improvements and UI improvements

The Leviathans Story Pack, meanwhile, will contain the following. This IS an exhaustive list:

Guardians feature
Enclaves feature
War in Heaven feature
5 new portraits ('cuties')
20+ minutes of new music by Andreas Waldetoft

With that out of the way, on to today's topic! Today we'll be talking about Enclaves, one of the above listed paid features. Enclaves are a new type of precursors those with the Leviathans Story Pack will encounter while exploring the galaxy. Instead of living on planets and controlling an empire, they are neutral traders, artists and scholars who reside in ancient space stations and who will offer their services to anyone who is willing to pay.

There are three types of Enclaves, each with their own range of interactions:

Traders allow you to exchange minerals for energy and vice versa.
Artists allow you to commission a piece of art that can be placed on one of your planets as a building, or become their patron to support more advanced works.
Curators allow you to purchase star charts, enlist their aid in furthering your research, or purchase information about the different Guardians and their weaknesses.

In addition to these basic interactions, each type of Enclave also has an 'advanced' interaction. This interaction is not immediately available, but must be earned by building up that Enclave's opinion of your empire. This is done by utilizing their basic interactions, so for example a Trader Enclave's opinion of you will increase every time you trade minerals and energy with them. An Enclave that is located inside of your borders will also have its opinion of you slowly increase over time. The advanced interactions are as follows:

Traders will sell you a unique strategic resource accessible only to them.
Artists can be asked to organize a festival across your worlds, improving happiness across your entire empire.
Curators will allow you to recruit one of their researchers, who provides access to unique technologies not otherwise researchable.

Of course, if your empire leans more towards the Fanatical Purifier type of thinking, you can also choose to simply attack an Enclave. Their space stations are powerful, but not invincible, and you may just find valuable salvage and technologies among the wreckage.

That's all for today! Next time we'll be talking about the headline feature of the Leviathans Story Pack, the Guardians, so stay tuned! In the meanwhile, here's a little teaser of what to expect...

Read the original post[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

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The Guardians

September 29, 2016, 4:38 am

≫ Next: Roar! & Boom!

≪ Previous: Enclaves coming in Stellaris: Leviathans!

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today we'll continue talking about the Leviathans Story Pack, specifically its headline feature: the Guardians.

The Guardians (Paid Feature)
The Guardians, or Leviathans as they're also known, are space-dwelling beings of immense power. They vary a great deal in biology and composition: Some are enormous space creatures, some are technological remnants of ancient civilizations, and some are something far different altogether. How you find them also varies - some you may encounter in their home systems, jealously guarding their territory, others may be unleashed on the galaxy by exploring the wrong planet or star.

The chance of a particular Guardian being present in your game will depend on the size of your galaxy - a tiny galaxy might only have one or two, while a Huge galaxy might contain nearly all or even all of them if you explore far enough. Defeating them, or in some cases, helping them, will unlock rewards in the form of resources, empire-wide modifiers and unique technologies. Guardians vary in power, but are meant to be a serious challenge for a mid-game empire, so don't expect to be able to bring them down in the first decades of the game.

Below I am going to talk a little about a few of the Guardians. These are just a sample and not nearly all of them, but we want to avoid showing off everything there is for a player to find in the Leviathans Story Pack for those who wish to explore and find out for themselves.

The Space Dragon
The Space Dragon is a capricious being, jealously guarding its hoard. With this particular Guardian, there is no reasoning or dialogue... it wants to be left alone, and will attack any and all trespassers in its territory. If you wish to get at its hoard, you will have to slay it, and you had best be sure to bring a large enough fleet - anger it enough, and it will not settle for simply driving you off. Should you bring it down, however, the vast mineral riches of its hoard will be yours to claim... and who knows what you might find among the treasures. Technology, artifacts... perhaps even a dragon egg?

The Infinity Machine
The Infinity Machine sits waiting at the edge of a massive black hole, a perfect metal sphere, unmoving. It does not attack as you approach, does not communicate, does not even react. It seems to be waiting for something. Perhaps if you find a way to communicate it, you can find out what it wants. Perhaps you can even help it? Or, if you choose, you could simply order your fleet to attack... after all, how much of a threat could a mere metal sphere be?

Stellarite
What can live inside a star?

What sort of being can withstand, and even thrive in, such immense heat and pressure?

What could be its purpose?

... what does it eat?

That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about changes to the graphics and sound of Stellaris coming in the Heinlein update, as well as a teaser on the more than 20 minutes of new music by Andreas Waldetoft included in the Leviathans Story Pack.

Read the original post[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

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