Today we’re going to take a deeper look at some of the ways we’re adjusting game pacing through changes to Galaxy Generation, Message Settings, Events and Anomalies. Then we’ll take a peek at the Focus system, the Empire Timeline, and a few other changes.
Some of this has already been covered in the announcement diary, but I’ll be providing more up-to-date screenshots and more details. As this is from a build that is still in active development, there will be placeholder icons or temporary text in some of these screenshots, and all of these are still subject to change.
Pacing Adjustments
Stellaris is a game with many moving parts, each of which interact with other elements to produce a complex whole. Small adjustments in one spot can have significant effects in another, and in the end there can be unexpected impact to the general pacing of the game and overall economy.
Galaxy Generation
As mentioned in Dev Diary #366, we’ve gone through all of the scripted systems and done a normalization pass on the frequency of these systems appearing, as well as preventing many of them from appearing in empire starting clusters. Some other adjustments have been made to generation as a whole, which should distribute non-guaranteed habitable worlds a bit better and reduce the likelihood of massive clusters of them right around your homeworld.
There were comments in the thread asking for the ability to easily change these weights. Since most of them now use scripted variables, they’ll be very easy to change with mods.
As the pool of anomalies and prescripted systems with guaranteed anomalies have also grown over the years, we’ve adjusted the anomaly spawn chance increment a bit to compensate.
Leader Traits
A minor change from the original announcement is that we’ve implemented a suggestion from the forum thread to have the trait selection levels on even levels - it’s much cleaner overall. Leaders still begin with a starting trait at level 1.
If you have trait selections to make, the leader level up Notifications will show the green “call to action”. If you don’t, they’ll have a more subdued monochrome icon.
Leader positions will also have a significantly greater effect on which traits will be selected for players without Galactic Paragons or those that prefer automatic trait selection. For those that prefer picking leader traits themselves, this bias is instead reflected in which traits are selected for the pool of possible traits whenever a new trait is available.
In Settings, we’re also letting you choose what you would like your default automatic trait selection to be. Any time you take over an empire as the primary human player (a distinction that is primarily relevant for co-op gameplay), it will make sure that the Auto Select Leader Traits box is set to your preference.
Events, Messages, and Notifications
We’re going through many events, messages, and notifications to reduce the number of popups that disrupt your general gameplay. While major events still appear as popups, those that don’t require an immediate response or are purely informational have been converted into notifications or toasts.
The Artisans and Mirror Dimension can wait until I’ve finished what I’m currently doing.
As we’ve been doing this pass, we’ve updated some of the messages that have been converted into toasts, to make them more informative at a glance.
Empire Focuses and the Timeline
While designing the Empire Focuses we had several thoughts.
- Stellaris is a dynamic game full of wonder and possibilities. Our sandbox nature means predefined and structured trees cannot work for us.
- Tasks provided by Focuses should help guide newer players through the game, providing suggestions for short and medium term goals.
- Behaving in a manner consistent with your Empire Focus should naturally complete the Tasks from that category. [list]
- Empire Focus categories are Conquest, Exploration, and Development. (Names subject to change.)
- Any rewards you get should feel narratively consistent with your empire’s behavior. For instance, acting as an aggressive militarist should naturally guide your researchers to theorizing applicable technologies.
- These rewards should reduce the need to rely on lucky draws from the tech pool if you want to pursue your Focus.
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The Empire Timeline and Focus share a tab in the Situation Log.
The current mockup of the Timeline tab. Some differences will exist between this and the final version.
Tasks come in four different categories - Conquest, Exploration, or Development correspond to the three different Focuses, and there are some very basic Tasks at the beginning that are considered “Core”. Completing a Task grants progress within its associated category; Core tasks grant progress in all three.
Many of the early game tasks are generally straightforward. The tooltips try to give some advice about how to complete them.
At any time your empire will have five tasks offered, weighted toward your selected Focus. Tasks complete automatically and retroactively, so if you’ve already completed an Archaeology Site, it will complete immediately if you draw it. If you have a Task that either feels impossible or isn’t something you want to do, you can discard it for a small Unity cost.
Many of the rewards for progression along a Focus are (currently) research options thematically associated with the Focus. For example, the first Conquest milestone grants Doctrine: Fleet Support as a guaranteed research option, while others in the line include Specialized Combat Computers and Destroyers. You’ll still have to research them, but we’re happy with how your actual actions in game have an impact on the ideas your researchers are coming up with.
The Empire Timeline shows many of the key events of your empire. Beginning with your Origin as the starting point, important milestones will be logged as they happen. Empire firsts feature prominently on the timeline, such as your first colony or the first time you’ve been humiliated by a Fallen Empire, but some other crucial moments are listed as well, such as war declarations, megastructures, when a crisis appeared, or when an accursed rival stole your Galatron.
The timeline has several zoom levels to let you see a general overview of what happened at a glance, or a detailed list of interesting moments.
Hard Reset
In the 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, we’re adding a new Origin to the Synthetic Dawn story pack called Hard Reset.
As a warning, this Origin gets pretty dark (even for Stellaris), very quickly.
In this Origin, you begin as the cybernetic battle thralls of an advanced Driven Assimilator that have suddenly lost connection to the gestalt intelligence. Naturally, you were outfitted with some of the finest combat cybernetics available.
Your civilization begins in an immediate fight for your lives.
Thankfully, as the elite battle thralls of your former masters, you excel at violence. This is good, because you’ll need to fight through rogue barrier fleets that still infest nearby systems.
I’m sure everything on Dream Loop is fine. No need to investigate further, right?
As with Broken Shackles, the exploration of yourselves as a people is a core part of this Origin, with factions forming a little while after you gain your independence.
Your sudden independence has also left your populace with some traits that represent your nature as Assimilator battle thralls. As you discover more about your past, you’ll have opportunities to either mitigate or enhance these traits, either by pursuing de-cyberization or by embracing the power of the machine. An alternate path exists where you can instead accept your conflicted nature and… Well, I won’t spoil what happens on that path.
Achievements
As part of the development process, we decided to take this opportunity to review some of the rules around gaining achievements. As I think that many of the simpler ones are a great tool for letting you know that you’re playing the game “correctly”, so we’ve made a change.
Ironman mode is no longer required to earn most Stellaris achievements. An unmodified game checksum and being in single-player remain as requirements.
- The "Victorious" achievement has been updated to "Win the game through any victory condition in Ironman mode."
Next Week
We’re still working on getting things like the pop and planet changes presentable, so next week we’ll likely be talking about Trade and Logistics.
See you then!
