[2023] Astral Planes is available now!

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2534090/Stellaris_Astral_Planes/

Astral Planes is available now!
Take a step into the unknown with Astral Planes, navigating an array of wonders and dangers alike. Travel through Rifts in space and time for a glimpse of strange, new realities. What will you discover, in a universe beyond limits?

Astral Planes includes:

• Core Mechanics
  
  • Astral Scars
    
  • New Site Type: Astral Rift
    
  • New Resource: Astral Thread
    
  • Astral Harvesting - Technology to harvest Astral Threads
    
  • Rift Sphere - Technology to explore Astral Rifts Rifts
    
  • "Rift in Space" Situation - Unlocks Rift Sphere tech.
    
  • Random Stage 2 Rift Situation Events
• 30+ Rift Sites - each site contains branching narratives, featuring multiple potential endings and a chance at powerful new rewards
  
• 8 New Relics
  
• Astral Actions
  • 10 New Astral Actions
    
  • 4 Additional Astral Actions that will swap depending on research (requires Overlord)
• The Formless
  
• 1 Origin - Riftworld Origin
  
• 4 Civics
  
  • Hyperspace Speciality
    
  • Dimensional Worship
    
  • Dark Consortium
    
  • Sovereign Guardianship
• New Sounds, Music and Visual Effects
  
  • 3 New Music Tracks from Andreas Waldetoft
    
  • 70+ New Event Pictures
    
  • 80+ New Sound Effects

* Some content may require DLC sold separately

3.10 "Pyxis" Free Custodian Update
Before you jump into the game, check out the latest from our Custodian Development team: the 3.10 “Pyxis” Custodian Update! Here is a link to the full patch notes[forum.paradoxplaza.com].

If you experience bugs or other issues on 3.10 “Pyxis”, on a new save, without mods, please take the time to fill out a report on the bug report forums[forum.paradoxplaza.com]!

3.10 “Pyxis” brings with it a consolidation of Leader Classes, vastly improving leader’s usefulness, and addressing some community concerns with regards to the Leader Cap introduced with 3.8 “Gemini”, as well as introducing a new Council Legitimacy Mechanic, further updates on the Additional Content Browser, and improving the Outliner by introducing tabs to help you manage your late-game Empires.

As we mentioned at the 3.9 “Caelum” release, we softened up the leader cap, as many in the Community were finding it too restrictive to gameplay. At the time, we mentioned this was a temporary solution while we worked on a more comprehensive leader rework.

Enter, the Leader Consolidation

With leaders becoming more important to your empire following the 3.8 ‘Gemini’ release alongside Galactic Paragons, there were some rough edges leftover and experiences that could be better.

Taking into account our internal vision of how leaders should work, and combining it with feedback we’ve gathered from the Community during the time since the 3.8 “Gemini” released, we have put together a system of leaders that we feel will address many concerns, and eliminate or lessen the rough edges and bad experiences.

The Leader Consolidation reduces the number of Leader Classes from four to three:
Commanders - are the military-focused leaders in your empire. These leaders can lead fleets, armies, be governors or sit on your Empire Council.
Officials - are the Administrative class of leaders, and focus on governing your empire’s planets, maintaining relationships with Federations and the Galactic Community, or can further focus your Empire Council to either diplomacy or internal production
Scientists - focus on developing your empire’s knowledge of the universe, exploration, and discovery, or can govern planets in your Empire (replacing the Assist Research functionality)

Each leader can now gain one of four Veterancy Subclasses, allowing you to specialize your leaders even further:

Commanders

• Admiral - Focuses on Fleets and general naval combat
  
• General - Focuses on taking planets and assaulting static defenses - Armies, Planetary Bombardment, Ground Combat, and attacking defensive structures such as Starbases are the General’s forte
  
• Commissioner - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Martial Law)
  
• Strategist - Focuses on the Council, especially the Minister of Defense position

Official

• Delegate - Focuses on Federations and the Galactic Community
  
• Industrialist - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Industry and Development)
  
• Ambassador - Council Focus (Diplomacy, Espionage, and First Contact), especially suited for the new Minister of State position
  
• Advisor - Council Focus (Economy)

Scientist

• Explorer - Focuses on Surveying and Exploration
  
• Academic - Focuses on Archaeology and Anomalies
  
• Analyst - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Assist Research)
  
• Statistician - Focuses on the Council, especially the Minister of Science position

To make leveling up feel more rewarding for those of you who do not own Galactic Paragons, traits chosen upon leveling up will now be weighted towards the job your leaders are currently performing.

Changes to the Leader Capacity

In 3.10 “Pyxis”, each Leader class has its own leader capacity, and exceeding that capacity for one Leader type will only affect that leader class.

The effects of being over capacity have been changed as well: being double your Leader Capacity will now result in unity upkeep for that leader class increasing by 100%, and XP gain for that leader class dropping by around 47%.

Planetary and Sector Governance

As some of you may have noticed from above, all three Leader Classes can now govern your Empire’s worlds. Each Leader class has certain inherent bonuses to governing planets that scale with their Leader level, in addition to the bonuses provided by choosing the planetary governor-styled Veterancy Subclass:

Governing Effects (effects increase with Leader Level):
Commanders:

• Ruler and Specialist Pop output: -5%
  
• Worker and Slave Pop output: +5%
  
• Crime: -2
  
• Empire Size from Pops: -2%
  
• Stability from Soldiers: +2

Officials:

• Basic, Advanced and Strategic Resources from Jobs: +5%
  
• Empire Size from Pops: -2%

Scientists:

• Physics, Society and Engineering Research from Jobs: +5%
  
• Empire Size from Pops: -2%

These effects apply to the planet the leader is ruling, and if that planet is the sector capital, will apply half their effects to the planets in the sector. Throughout the game, we’ve gone and ensured that the majority of governor-related traits and leader effects apply at full strength to the planet they are governing and at half strength to all other planets in the same sector, if they are governing the sector capital.

Planetary governors will always supersede the sector governor, if one exists. Thus you might have an Industrialist overseeing your core sector and assign a Commissioner to a planet where that pesky Criminal Syndicate has set up shop in order to drive down crime.

As mentioned earlier, each leader class also has a veteran subclass dedicated to governance, which is required to gain governor veteran traits. Many of the traits from the Industrialist (Governor), Pioneer (Governor), Protector (General), and Analyst (Scientist) have been distributed throughout the various governing subclasses during the rework.

Minister of State

The Minister of State, a new Empire Council Position available to the base-game, increases the effectiveness of your Empire’s Envoys. Owners of Galactic Paragons will now be able to use the Reorganize Council Agenda to reassign all Council positions (with the exception of the Ruler), but replacing the starting Council Positions will come with a cost.

• Minister of Defense: -25% Naval Capacity
  
• Minister of State: -25% Diplomatic Weight
  
• Head of Research: -25% Research Speed

Certain Civics (currently Inwards Perfection and Fanatic Purifiers) block access to the Minister of State position and will instead start with their Civic Council Position unlocked.

Council Legitimacy

Back in 3.8 we added Council Legitimacy. Although it had no mechanical effects, it was a good step to represent the degree to which factions in your empire approve of how the empire is run, the council, empire policies and so on. In 3.10, having high Council Legitimacy will give a bonus to Council Agenda Speed (capping at +25% at 100% Legitimacy) and having low Council Legitimacy will give a penalty to Council Agenda Speed (capping at -50% at 0% Legitimacy). For modders, these values are determined by defines.

Since Council Legitimacy is a weighted sum of the approval of each faction multiplied by their support in the empire, this means that empires with relatively few factions (each of which have high approval) should manage to pass Agendas more quickly.

Galactic Diplomacy

Officials can now be assigned as Federation Representatives and Galactic Community Emissaries instead of Envoys. An Official assigned to one of these positions gives the same effects as a number of Envoys equal to their level did back before 3.10. Thus, your envoys are now freed to improve or harm relations with other empires or build spy networks in them.

For Officials that are assigned to either the GalCom or your Federation, there is now a veteran subclass (Delegate) and a variety of veteran traits that can be used in these assignments.

Is that all?

Over the course of the Leader Consolidation, we’ve rebalanced the majority of civics that were leader related or themed. As part of this, we've also changed effects that previously made it too easy to support a near-infinite number of vassals. While reworking leader classes and traits, we’ve also gone through and rebalanced leader adjacent tradition trees and ascension perks. There are some great changes in there, and we hope you have fun discovering the new things you can do!

Outliner Improvements​

Another bit of feedback we’ve gotten a lot is that the outliner has gotten cumbersome over the years. While we’ve added some ability to customize it in past releases, in 3.10.0 we’re adding Outliner Tabs.

In this first version of the tabbed outliner, we have four tabs: Government, Ships, Politics, and Structures. These tabs will appear in the outliner once they’re relevant.

Notification bubbles can be activated on the tabs to let you know if there’s something of interest on them. Green ones are for non-urgent things like “a planet got colonized and has been added to the Government tab”, while red ones are a call to action, like “your science ship has no scientist”.

We look forward to seeing your feedback on this first version of the outliner rework!

Thanks for reading! You can pick up Astral Planes on Steam Now! And if you experience bugs or other issues with 3.10 “Pyxis”, you can report on them on the Stellaris Bug Report forums[forum.paradoxplaza.com]!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2534090/Stellaris_Astral_Planes/