by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
It’s been two weeks, so let’s get straight into the good stuff.
Summary of Results
Much like the first Technology Open Beta, very experienced players formed the bulk of respondents. This time it was closer to 72% of responses coming from players with over 1,000 hours in game. (Only 1.4% said they had less than 300 hours in Stellaris, so the survey skewed very much towards our most passionate players.) Thank you all for your feedback and help.
This time, a majority of players rated technology progress as “just right”, with the remainder almost perfectly evenly split between it being too fast or too slow, with a majority consensus that the changes were beneficial overall.
Many players missed the breakthrough technologies and the general opinion tended to lean towards us pulling back a little too far. Many players commented that they liked how technology tiers 3 and higher felt more impactful, but lamented that with the removal of breakthroughs, tier 2 sort of melded into tier 1 technologies.
There was also quite a spirited discussion on the Stellaris forums regarding the pros and cons of galaxy generation sliders and their effects on new players.
Our general philosophy is that it is better to permit more customization of your play experience than less, but that the default settings should be a positive play experience for inexperienced players. New players tend not to adjust the sliders much, while veterans tend to have more understanding of the exact effects of the various settings and can customize their game to satisfy their needs - but the default settings, except for difficulty, should be sufficient for an enjoyable game. We do agree that the galaxy settings screen has grown a significant amount over the years and could benefit from some reworking, and will be placing that task on the Custodian “to-do” list for sometime in the future.
Next Steps
Overall, I consider the Technology Open Betas a significant success. We gathered a lot of useful information and feedback, and it gave us the chance to experiment with some systems that may or may not have panned out. We will be going forward with including the changes from the second Technology Open Beta in the 3.11 “Eridanus” update.
Breakthrough Technologies will not be coming at this time, but we may experiment with technology spread and similar effects sometime in the future.
One new change we’ll be making based on some of the data we’ve collected is that we’re moving Ascension Theory to Tier 4 from Tier 5, but it will only be available to empires that have completed at least six tradition trees. As Unity and Research are intended to be “opposing” resources to a degree, we did not want the capstone of Ascension based gameplay to be so strongly tied to the later game tech tree.
Now let’s hear about one of the other changes coming in the update.
Resort Worlds
Hello, Stellaris community. I'm Gatekeeper, a long-time modder who's ascended into being part of the Stellaris Content team. And if you know anything about what I've done in the past, I like planets.
One thing I've done recently is to imagine a galaxy where Resort Worlds aren't just post-apocalyptic fortress worlds. Instead, these are vibrant, dedicated havens of rest, starkly contrasting the often harsh realities of interstellar life.
The Resort Worlds technology which permits the Create Resort World planetary decision is no longer rare, and we've lowered it to tier 2. We've updated the decision’s restrictions; it no longer has a minimum planet size but can be used on planets that have upgraded capital buildings. As funny as it was (and we did it all the time), you can no longer declare a tomb or relic world a vacation paradise.
A pass has also been done on what buildings are allowed on Resort Worlds.
Instead of providing perfect habitability, Clerks, and Entertainers, Resort Worlds now provide Resort Districts that give Housing, Building Slots, and Resort Worker jobs that provide Trade, and increase Amenities and Trade Value from Living Standards across all planets of your empire. This replaces the empire-wide Amenities reduction of the old version.
On behalf of the United Caphevan Commonwealth, we would like to wish you a pleasant stay on Evaggimar II.
Next Week
Next week we’ll be looking at some of the fixes and changes going into the 3.11 “Eridanus” update. See you then!
