[2023] Stellaris Dev Diary #322 - 3.10.0 “Pyxis” Custodian Features

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

by Eladrin

Hello everyone!

The Stellaris 3.10.0 “Pyxis” update will be released alongside the Astral Planes Narrative Expansion on Thursday, November 16th. The expansion has a 10% discount until November 27th.


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

Today we’ll have an extra dev diary reviewing some of the features the Custodian Team has been working on.

Preliminary release notes will be posted next Tuesday, with final release notes posted on Thursday alongside the release.

Let's get to it!

Leader Consolidation​ We introduced the idea of the Leader Consolidation back in Dev Diary #307[forum.paradoxplaza.com] and then gave an update in Dev Diary #316[forum.paradoxplaza.com]. Today we’ll go in deeper detail regarding the changes that will be coming in 3.10.0.

To recap from DD#316, but with the new subclass effects included:


Admirals and Generals have been merged into the Commander, the Military leader class.

Admiral and General will remain as veteran classes, with the following foci:

• Admiral - Focuses on Fleets and general naval combat
  
  • Ship Weapon Damage: +5%
    
  • Ship Fire Rate: +5%
    
  • Ship Disengage Chance: +5%
• 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
  
  • Ship Damage Against Starbases: +5%
    
  • Ship Orbital Bombardment Damage: +5%
    
  • Army Damage: +5%
• Commissioner - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Martial Law)
  
  • Planet Effects:
    
    • +2 Soldier Jobs
  • Sector Effects:
    
    • +1 Soldier Jobs
• Strategist - Focuses on the Council, especially the Minister of Defense position
  
  • Military Ship Build Speed: +5%

The old Governors and some Envoy functions have been merged into Officials, the Administrative leader class.

• Delegate - Focuses on Federations and the Galactic Community
  
  • GalCom Effects: +5% Diplomatic Weight
    
  • Federation Effects: +0.5 Monthly Cohesion
• Industrialist - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Industry and Development)
  
  • Planet Effects:
    
    • Resources from Specialist Jobs: +5%
      
    • Pop Amenities Usage: -10%
  • Sector Effects:
    
    • Resources from Specialist Jobs: +2.5%
      
    • Pop Amenities Usage: -5%
• Ambassador - Council Focus (Diplomacy, Espionage, and First Contact), especially suited for the new Minister of State position
  
  • Country Trust Growth: +5%
• Advisor - Council Focus (Economy)
  
  • Pop Upkeep: -5%
    
  • Trade Value: +5%

Scientists remain the third, Scientific leader class.

Veteran Classes:

• Explorer - Focuses on Surveying and Exploration
  
  • Survey Speed: +10%
    
  • Anomaly Discovery Chance: +10%
• Academic - Focuses on Archaeology and Anomalies
  
  • Anomaly Research Speed: +10%
    
  • Archaeology Excavation Speed: +10%
    
  • Astral Rift Exploration Speed: +10%
• Analyst - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Assist Research)
  
  Planet Effects:
  • Research from Jobs: +10%
  Sector Effects:
  • Research from Jobs: +5%
• Statistician - Focuses on the Council, especially the Minister of Science position
  
  • Research Speed: +5%

As part of this redesign, we’ve gone through and rebalanced or replaced hundreds of leader traits. Many have changed significantly, and the overall power level has generally been decreased.

In order to ensure that leader levelling feels rewarding, regardless of owning Galactic Paragons or not, traits chosen when levelling up will now be biased towards the leader's current position.

As mentioned in the previous dev diaries, leader caps are now per-class, and exceeding one only affects that class.



Governors ​
With the removal of the “Governor” leader class, we’ve now allowed all leader classes to govern planets and sectors. Each leader class focuses on a different aspect of governance:

• Officials are better suited to be generalists and governing your resource extraction and industrial worlds.
  
• Scientists are better suited to governing research worlds, which has replaced the Assist Research functionality that the science ship formerly had.
  
• Commanders are better suited to govern recently conquered worlds and those with a high level of crime.

While bringing back sector governors, we still wanted local planetary governors to be desirable in some cases. Thus, 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.

However, a planetary governor 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.


The modifiers for each leader class when governing. These are multiplied by the leader’s level.​

Each leader class also has a veteran subclass dedicated to governance, which is required to gain governor veteran traits.



Many of the various traits from the Industrialist (Governor), Pioneer (Governor), Protector (General), and Analyst (Scientist) have been distributed throughout the various governing subclasses in the rework.

Representatives and Emissaries​ In addition to the Minister of State Council position that most non-Gestalt empires now have at the start of the game. 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.




The Minister of State position provides several bonuses to your envoys.

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. As mentioned above, as not having a Minister of State will impart a -25% Diplomatic Weight penalty, we’ve reduced the penalty for the Isolationist Diplomatic Stance from -50% to -25%.



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




Admirals, Generals and Commanders ​
As mentioned above, we’ve combined Admirals and Generals into the Commander leader class. Broadly speaking, their subclass traits were assigned as follows:

• Aggressor -> Admiral
  
• Tactician -> Admiral
  
• Strategist -> Strategist
  
• Invader -> General
  
• Protector -> Split between General and Commissioner
  
• Marshal -> Split between Strategist (army-related traits) and Ambassador (espionage-related traits)

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.



For owners of Galactic Paragons, we’ve made the Minister of Defense, Head of Research and new Minister of State council positions no longer mandatory. Instead, when you choose to Reorganize the Council, these positions will be removed and can be reselected, much like Civic and Enclave Council Positions. However, each of these positions will have their own penalties if they are not present and staffed.

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

During the work done for the Leader Consolidation, we discussed various ideas for further improving the council mechanics and may revisit them at some point in the future.

Civics ​
We’ve rebalanced the majority of civics that were leader related or themed, and I’ll leave you with a few examples. As part of this, we've also changed effects that previously made it too easy to support a near-infinite number of vassals.





Traditions & Ascension Perks​ While reworking leader classes and traits, we’ve also gone through and rebalanced leader adjacent tradition trees and ascension perks:

Aptitude

• Opener: Swapped +1 Trait on leaders for +1 Trait Selection when leveling up.
  
• Finisher: Replaced effects with +1 Commander, +1 Official and +1 Scientist Cap
  
• The Empire Needs You: No longer increases Leader Pool Size
  
• Specialist Training: Swapped +25% Leader XP gain for +1 Leader Pool Size
  
• Psychological Profiling: No longer reduces the number of negative traits leaders can have
  
• Healthcare Program: Swapped +20 Leader Lifespan for -1 Max Negative Traits
  
• Champions of the Empire: Replaced effects with +1 Leader Initial Level.

Discovery

• Science Division: Replaced Scientist Cost and Upkeep modifiers with +1 Scientist Capacity and +1 Scientist Initial Level.

Domination

• Colonial Viceroys: Replaced Governor Cost and Upkeep modifiers with +1 Official Capacity and +1 Official Initial Level.

Enmity

• Rise to the Occasion: Now provides +1 Commander, +1 Official and +1 Scientist Cap for every 3 Rivals.

Politics:

• Opener and Gravitas: Now affect Officials assigned to GalCom, not Envoys.

Statecraft:

• Opener: Increased Edict Fund from 20 to 50.
  
• Finisher: Replaced effects with -5% Empire Size
  
• Constitutional Focus: Increased Council Agenda Speed to 25% from 10%
  
• Immutable Directives: Increased Agenda Duration to 25% from 10%
  
• Amongst Peers: Replaced effects with Councilor gain 150 XP per Level when an Agenda is completed
  
• Shared Benefits: Replaced effects with +1 Effective Councilor Level

Supremacy

• War Games: Replaced Admiral Cost and Upkeep modifiers with +1 Commander Capacity and +1 Commander Initial Level.

Unyielding

• Resistance is Frugal: Removed modifiers for Generals

Synthetics

• Non-Machine Opener: Replaced effects with -25% Roboticist Upkeep and -25% Robot Upkeep

Ascension Perks

• Archaeo-Engineers: Added +1 Scientist Capacity
  
• Galactic Force Projection: Reworked, now increases Influence from Power Projection by 2, gives +1 Commander Capacity, +100 Naval Capacity and +50 Fleet Capacity.
  
• Eternal Vigilance: Added +1 Commander Capacity
  
• Imperial Prerogative: Added +2 Official Capacity
  
• Transcendent Learning: Now provides +2 Scientist Capacity and +25% Leader XP gain
  
• Universal Transactions: Added +1 Official Capacity and +20% Commercial Pact Effectiveness

The Additional Content Browser​ We often see threads asking exactly what’s in each of our DLCs. In an effort to improve the clarity of what you’re getting with each release, we’ve expanded the Recommended Content element that’s been in the game for a while, and made some improvements.

The Recommended Content element gave brief descriptions of the various DLCs, but left a lot of questions. We’ve replaced this with a more robust Additional Content Browser that can draw information directly from game files, providing much more detailed and accurate preview information. Hopefully this will help you make more informed decisions about DLC purchases.



Concepts in Tooltips are fully supported in the additional content browser.


Portraits, ship sets, megastructures, and screenshots can be shown on the left hand side. Pack details and tooltip-able lists go on the right.

The Additional Content Browser will only be available on some storefronts, and will not update information without an active internet connection.

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”.




The OUN Avamdur is leaderless. I should do something about that.

In future releases, we plan on exploring some more ideas we had to make the Outliner more customizable and even more useful.

Event Chain Subtitles​ Finally, we custodians have also added a small new quality of life to help you keep track of what events belong to what chain! This new subtitle can be manually added to events and when clicked it will bring you to the relevant situation log.

Since these have to be added manually however we will be asking for your help to hunt down any event chains you feel should be tracked this way but aren’t once the patch is out. We should have a form available in the dev diary two weeks from now, after the 3.10.0 release.



What’s Next?​ This dev diary was a few days early so we could get this information to you before the 3.10.0 “Pyxis” and Astral Planes release. Preliminary release notes will be posted next Tuesday, with final release notes posted on Thursday alongside the release. (Replacing the normal dev diary scheduled for the 16th.)

Regular dev diaries will resume the week after, on November 23rd.

See you then!