[2019] 2.2.5 patch released, and 2.2.6 beta available

[img]https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/9703436/1da20fbb075a864837dbe608a638080827dd5c3b.png

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Checksum information:
2.2.5 release: 05d3
2.2.6 beta: 1018

Hi all, Jamor brings you new set of patch notes this week and some news! We'd like to announce that after a good period of beta testing, 2.2.5 is now fully live. It contains a ton of balance, AI, and performance improvements as well as bug fixes, and is all in all a greatly superior version to 2.2.4. It features a big balance pass on machine empires, and we were also finally able to find the fix for the long-lived "meandering strike craft" problem. Thanks to all the intrepid open beta testers who helped us get it ready for release.

Based on the feedback and testing done during 2.2.5 beta, we've also created version 2.2.6. We've taken the decision to do this as a beta as well, to give it the time to be proven before fully flipping to live. This will be useful since it includes a few brand new quality of life features that we want to try out in field conditions. More on that in a bit, first let's take a look at the fixes contained in the 2.2.5 live version:

################################################################# ######################### VERSION 2.2.5 ########################### ################################################################# ################### # Balance ################### * Pop growth: Reduced Random factor in pop growth, habitability has more of penalty on growth selection, lessened bias towards new species, and traits have a larger effect on Robot selection * Strike craft now do more damage, have longer range, are faster, and turn and accelerate quicker * Machine Empires get 50% more resources from mining bases * Machine Empire Tech Drones now produce 6 energy (up from 4) base. Agri Drones now produce 5 food (down from 6) base. Both of these also apply to Synth Empires. * Machine Empire Colony ships now add 2 pops to a new colony, but cost 400 alloys (up from 300) * Machine Empire Outposts now cost 150 alloys * Machine Empire Fabricators produce 4 alloys (up from 3) at the cost of 8 minerals (up from 6). * New Machine Empire colonies start with 2 replicator jobs to give a bit of early boost (up from 1), upgraded capitals reduced to give the same number overall. The extra Replicator jobs beyond the 2 granted by upgraded capital buildings now depend on the planet still having >= 10/40 pops, to remove a tedious exploit with resettling pops to unlock the upgrade, then moving them again * Machine capital planet grants +5% drone output * Unemployed Machine Pops now use 0.25 Energy for upkeep (down from 1) * Replicators now also produce 1 Engineering research * Coordinators now produce 1 of each Research (was 3 Society) * Each Coordinator on a planet now boosts Simple Drone resource output by 1% * Energy grids/nexus' are more expensive, but give an additional 5% bonus and add 2/4 Max Generator Districts to their planet. This also applies to Synth empires * Mineral purification plants/hubs are more expensive, but give an additional 5% bonus and add 2/4 Max Mining Districts to their planet. This also applies to Synth empires * Robots with Emotion Emulators are now more likely to become maintenance drones * Citizen Service civic effect on soldier unity generation increased from +1 to +2 * Eco Simulation, Gene Crops and Nano-Vitality Crops technology effect on farmer output increased from +10% to +20% * Geothermal Fracking, Deep Core Mining, Mineral Isolation technology effect on miner output increased from 10% to 20% * Field Modulation, Quantum Energy States, Quantum Field Manipulation technology effect on technician output increased from 10% to 20% * The Repugnant/Uncanny trait now has less of an effect on pops avoiding amenity producing jobs * Maintenance drone job priority now considers amenity level of the planet * Simple drones now ponder the empire level food/mineral/energy income when choosing a job * Made the bad outcome of the Abandoned Terraforming Project event produce a Tomb World, rather than a totally unusable Toxic World * Added potential negative outcomes the Atomic Clock chain, since previously there was no real choice involved * Made Fanatic Purifiers always able to choose "no retreat" war doctrine * Scaled back bonus resources from planet modifiers to just be for chthonian planets and carbon world, for now... * When freed from the time loop, the Prikkiki-Ti lizards will start with the same level of tech as their closest neighbour. Also their economy and fleet power has been improved * Telepaths, head researchers, high priests, administrators, executives, researchers, enforcers and entertainers now have weights for ascension/events/uplifts related traits * Returned removed orbital deposits to uninhabitable Precursor homeworlds * Species with very low habitability will not generally be selected to grow new pops * Ministry of Culture for Hive Mind empire now adds Synapse drone jobs, rather than Coordinators ################### # UI ################### * Added missing modifiers on army strength to some tooltips * Fixed some text overlaps in the empire creation screen for Robot Empires in Russian language * Fixed missing tooltip on leftmost trait, if a leader had more than three traits * Removed some obsolete modifiers from the shipyard UI * Fixed resource cost display in colonization menu showing all required resources as red, even if you were only short on one of them * Updated Machine intelligence food tooltip to mention that Cyborgs need food too. Don't let your Cyborgs starve! * Unhallowed Ground Traditionalist pop faction demand tooltip now clarifies that even terraforming tombworlds upsets them * Clarified relative power requirement to offer subsidiary status in the tooltip for this diplo action * Fixed the Expansion Tradition finisher effect not being displayed in tooltip about max district numbers, making the math look really broken * Fixed bug where closing planet view side panel brings up redundant window for a split second * Plasma Accelerators no longer display Caravan Cannon tooltips * Migration pull tool tip now displays actual pull with factors * Fixed tooltip that wrongly stated that only full citizens can take ruler jobs * Fixed debug string shown in the tooltip of certain diplomacy interactions with fallen empires * Fixed broken string in tooltip for event option you absolutely should not click, you have been warned ################### # AI ################### * Machine and Mechanical AI empires will favor generator districts a bit more * AI will not build housing buildings when it doesn't need them * AI will no longer start scrapping buildings immediately once it decides it doesn't need more of them, it will just stop building new ones for a while * Improved AI budgeting for megastructures * AI empires will generally not build more than 2 buildings of the same type per planet * AI should be keen on building Organic sanctuaries if their bio-trophy pops are unemployed * AI only becomes more interested in building commercial zones if it needs energy and amenities (was previously overbuilding these) * AI will check for surplus population before making buildings * AI now budgets the full total available resources into categories ################### # Performance ################### * Reduced performance cost of the outliner * Threaded calculations for rendering planet icons on the galaxy map * Cached habitability calculations for planet icons on the galaxy map ################### # Modding ################### * Changed scope of the faction_approval trigger from pop scope to pop_faction scope, making it not broken anymore ################### # Bugfixes ################### * Fixed broken targeting for strike craft that caused them to meander out to the edges of the system rather than engage enemy fleets * Fixed some Planetary Features (and thus Districts) not surviving the terraforming process to Gaia planet class, because what's a paradise planet if you can't strip mine it and turn it in to a honeycombed shell?! * Foundry level 3 now correctly gives Machine Empires Fabricator jobs instead of Foundry Drones * Fixed Private Colony Ships being generated without names in some circumstances * Fixed an issue where the "Galactic Market Hub Nomination" Decision would once again become available if a nominated planet's rating was boosted past a certain point * Orc and cyclops portraits from the Humanoid species pack no longer have a shoulder clipping through their clothing * Fixed an out of sync due to parallelization of pops calculation * Fixed a source of OOS on reconnect * Fixed OOS introduced by caching starbase related values * Fixed clicking "colonize" on a planet not working for Machine Empires (planet naming didn't work, colony ship insta-builds but did nothing, this bug was a real champion) * Free movement faction demand no longer cares about robots or their rights * Pops without military service rights will no longer take soldier or enforcer jobs * Fixed not being able to assign/unassign leader (by clicking portrait) from fleet manager view * Fixed literally unplayable typos in certain Italian names in the human namelist * Fixed a case where a build outpost command inside space you already own would wrongly claim you were trying to build in another empire's territory * Finally got around to adding a proper confirmation click sound when adding claims on the galaxy map * Fixed cases where pop growth would not overflow properly after a new pop is spawned (99+3 used to = 100), causing all sorts of weirdness with pop growth modifiers * Fixed cases where science ships on auto-explore would just stop, or randomly choose a crazy indirect path to the next unexplored system * Fixed the supply ship wreckage event to not fire if the other party is a genocidal empire, since it makes little sense for them * Fixed Expansionist Overtures leader agenda appearing before you've made contact with any other empires * Fixed an issue where a Fallen Empire's Shielded World would not spawn * You can now build multiple habitats at the same time, in the same system * Fixed the "Ships Lost" outcome of the Fleet Maneuvers event sometimes not having any effect, by preventing it firing if there are too few ships in the fleet to destroy * Updated the text in some of the Synth Uprising events to better convey the scale of the disaster, since while we'll never tell how many beings compose a Pop, it's probably more than a dozen * Removed nonfunctional and unintended "merge fleets" button for things like the lost amoeba, that are not supposed to merge with normal fleets * Fixed a pathfinding issue that would cause fleet to not move towards their destination * Fixed ship losses not being correctly counted in the battle list in the war overview * Fixed a bug from 2016 (!) where if you split a fleet, then tried to drag-box select both, only one would be picked * Atomic clock follow-up anomaly rewards that grant Engineering deposits will now correctly convert any existing Mining Stations into Research Stations * Fixed duplicate component slot and moved slots around on the Automated Dreadnought * Fixed bug where deposits granting districts wouldn't actually grant the districts until a game reload * Bonus minerals from planet modifiers will no longer overwrite the dragon hoard * Fixed bountiful plains (level 1 food deposit) not showing up on savannah worlds * Fixed workers abandoning the mines to displace specialists, leading to basic resource starvation and a lot of unemployed high strata pops later in the game. No social mobility for you! * No longer possible to sometimes rival countries that have pathetic relative power * Made sure to cull the old, empty lost amoeba fleet from the fleet manager as the amoeba matures * Ensured capital buildings can convert to the correct type when a planet of primitives/machines/hive minds is taken over by another empire type * AH4B from Distant Stars can no longer change composition to prevent naval capacity bypass exploit * Dead/killed slaves are now properly culled from the slave market, so no more invalid entries, you heartless monsters * Added checks to help ensure that buildings specific to one empire type are properly destroyed/converted when the world is taken over by a different empire type * Fixed primitives and fallen/awakened empire pops not being purged by the Prethoryn and Contingency (Valar Morghulis) * Fixed the Horizon Signal's "waiting world" events erroneously occurring on Ecumenopolises * Coloniziable planets will no longer be clear-cut and paved over to hold a single mineral or energy deposit by survey teams who become over-excited at their planet modifiers * Caravaneer weapons should no longer appear at game start * Fixed pop growth bravely continuing even while the planet was being purged by the Prethoryn * Fixed coming across the Caravansary home base (before encountering a Caravaneer Fleet) not giving you communications with them * Added fixes for more cases where the Scourge would sometimes stop expanding * Fixed Contingency and Scourge not being able to purge the final pop on an occupied planet, because thoroughness is important * Fixed An Odd Factor event triggering even if no pop had the Odd Factory Worker job, and pops not actually being removed by event despite claims to the contrary * Fixed broken pirate ship turret graphics
As mentioned before, we're also putting out a new open beta version for you bold souls who want to get first access to the next round of fixes and improvements. 2.2.6 is available now on the stellaris_test beta branch, as well as being the release version on Paradoxplaza and Good Old Games. If you are playing on Steam and want to multiplayer with friends on Plaza or GoG, you need to be on this beta version.

2.2.6 has a new, reworked planet management screen, with the objective of making it easier to see relevant info about a world and make informed decisions. We think it'll make handling your economy and population easier, so please give it a try. 2.2.6 features a completely redone the ship upgrade system, making it so ships are upgraded individually, on a ship-by-ship, shipyard-by-shipyard basis. No longer will interrupting an upgrade order cancel upgrade progress for the entire fleet. We also included improvements to the economic and military AI. AI empires should now be much less passive, more competent opponent in war.

To read the full 2.2.6 beta patch notes, head over to the full patch notes post[forum.paradoxplaza.com] on our official forums.

Checksum information:
2.2.5 release: 05d3
2.2.6 beta: 1018

Hi all, Jamor brings you new set of patch notes this week and some news! We'd like to announce that after a good period of beta testing, 2.2.5 is now fully live. It contains a ton of balance, AI, and performance improvements as well as bug fixes, and is all in all a greatly superior version to 2.2.4. It features a big balance pass on machine empires, and we were also finally able to find the fix for the long-lived "meandering strike craft" problem. Thanks to all the intrepid open beta testers who helped us get it ready for release.

Based on the feedback and testing done during 2.2.5 beta, we've also created version 2.2.6. We've taken the decision to do this as a beta as well, to give it the time to be proven before fully flipping to live. This will be useful since it includes a few brand new quality of life features that we want to try out in field conditions. More on that in a bit, first let's take a look at the fixes contained in the 2.2.5 live version:

################################################################# ######################### VERSION 2.2.5 ########################### ################################################################# ################### # Balance ################### * Pop growth: Reduced Random factor in pop growth, habitability has more of penalty on growth selection, lessened bias towards new species, and traits have a larger effect on Robot selection * Strike craft now do more damage, have longer range, are faster, and turn and accelerate quicker * Machine Empires get 50% more resources from mining bases * Machine Empire Tech Drones now produce 6 energy (up from 4) base. Agri Drones now produce 5 food (down from 6) base. Both of these also apply to Synth Empires. * Machine Empire Colony ships now add 2 pops to a new colony, but cost 400 alloys (up from 300) * Machine Empire Outposts now cost 150 alloys * Machine Empire Fabricators produce 4 alloys (up from 3) at the cost of 8 minerals (up from 6). * New Machine Empire colonies start with 2 replicator jobs to give a bit of early boost (up from 1), upgraded capitals reduced to give the same number overall. The extra Replicator jobs beyond the 2 granted by upgraded capital buildings now depend on the planet still having >= 10/40 pops, to remove a tedious exploit with resettling pops to unlock the upgrade, then moving them again * Machine capital planet grants +5% drone output * Unemployed Machine Pops now use 0.25 Energy for upkeep (down from 1) * Replicators now also produce 1 Engineering research * Coordinators now produce 1 of each Research (was 3 Society) * Each Coordinator on a planet now boosts Simple Drone resource output by 1% * Energy grids/nexus' are more expensive, but give an additional 5% bonus and add 2/4 Max Generator Districts to their planet. This also applies to Synth empires * Mineral purification plants/hubs are more expensive, but give an additional 5% bonus and add 2/4 Max Mining Districts to their planet. This also applies to Synth empires * Robots with Emotion Emulators are now more likely to become maintenance drones * Citizen Service civic effect on soldier unity generation increased from +1 to +2 * Eco Simulation, Gene Crops and Nano-Vitality Crops technology effect on farmer output increased from +10% to +20% * Geothermal Fracking, Deep Core Mining, Mineral Isolation technology effect on miner output increased from 10% to 20% * Field Modulation, Quantum Energy States, Quantum Field Manipulation technology effect on technician output increased from 10% to 20% * The Repugnant/Uncanny trait now has less of an effect on pops avoiding amenity producing jobs * Maintenance drone job priority now considers amenity level of the planet * Simple drones now ponder the empire level food/mineral/energy income when choosing a job * Made the bad outcome of the Abandoned Terraforming Project event produce a Tomb World, rather than a totally unusable Toxic World * Added potential negative outcomes the Atomic Clock chain, since previously there was no real choice involved * Made Fanatic Purifiers always able to choose "no retreat" war doctrine * Scaled back bonus resources from planet modifiers to just be for chthonian planets and carbon world, for now... * When freed from the time loop, the Prikkiki-Ti lizards will start with the same level of tech as their closest neighbour. Also their economy and fleet power has been improved * Telepaths, head researchers, high priests, administrators, executives, researchers, enforcers and entertainers now have weights for ascension/events/uplifts related traits * Returned removed orbital deposits to uninhabitable Precursor homeworlds * Species with very low habitability will not generally be selected to grow new pops * Ministry of Culture for Hive Mind empire now adds Synapse drone jobs, rather than Coordinators ################### # UI ################### * Added missing modifiers on army strength to some tooltips * Fixed some text overlaps in the empire creation screen for Robot Empires in Russian language * Fixed missing tooltip on leftmost trait, if a leader had more than three traits * Removed some obsolete modifiers from the shipyard UI * Fixed resource cost display in colonization menu showing all required resources as red, even if you were only short on one of them * Updated Machine intelligence food tooltip to mention that Cyborgs need food too. Don't let your Cyborgs starve! * Unhallowed Ground Traditionalist pop faction demand tooltip now clarifies that even terraforming tombworlds upsets them * Clarified relative power requirement to offer subsidiary status in the tooltip for this diplo action * Fixed the Expansion Tradition finisher effect not being displayed in tooltip about max district numbers, making the math look really broken * Fixed bug where closing planet view side panel brings up redundant window for a split second * Plasma Accelerators no longer display Caravan Cannon tooltips * Migration pull tool tip now displays actual pull with factors * Fixed tooltip that wrongly stated that only full citizens can take ruler jobs * Fixed debug string shown in the tooltip of certain diplomacy interactions with fallen empires * Fixed broken string in tooltip for event option you absolutely should not click, you have been warned ################### # AI ################### * Machine and Mechanical AI empires will favor generator districts a bit more * AI will not build housing buildings when it doesn't need them * AI will no longer start scrapping buildings immediately once it decides it doesn't need more of them, it will just stop building new ones for a while * Improved AI budgeting for megastructures * AI empires will generally not build more than 2 buildings of the same type per planet * AI should be keen on building Organic sanctuaries if their bio-trophy pops are unemployed * AI only becomes more interested in building commercial zones if it needs energy and amenities (was previously overbuilding these) * AI will check for surplus population before making buildings * AI now budgets the full total available resources into categories ################### # Performance ################### * Reduced performance cost of the outliner * Threaded calculations for rendering planet icons on the galaxy map * Cached habitability calculations for planet icons on the galaxy map ################### # Modding ################### * Changed scope of the faction_approval trigger from pop scope to pop_faction scope, making it not broken anymore ################### # Bugfixes ################### * Fixed broken targeting for strike craft that caused them to meander out to the edges of the system rather than engage enemy fleets * Fixed some Planetary Features (and thus Districts) not surviving the terraforming process to Gaia planet class, because what's a paradise planet if you can't strip mine it and turn it in to a honeycombed shell?! * Foundry level 3 now correctly gives Machine Empires Fabricator jobs instead of Foundry Drones * Fixed Private Colony Ships being generated without names in some circumstances * Fixed an issue where the "Galactic Market Hub Nomination" Decision would once again become available if a nominated planet's rating was boosted past a certain point * Orc and cyclops portraits from the Humanoid species pack no longer have a shoulder clipping through their clothing * Fixed an out of sync due to parallelization of pops calculation * Fixed a source of OOS on reconnect * Fixed OOS introduced by caching starbase related values * Fixed clicking "colonize" on a planet not working for Machine Empires (planet naming didn't work, colony ship insta-builds but did nothing, this bug was a real champion) * Free movement faction demand no longer cares about robots or their rights * Pops without military service rights will no longer take soldier or enforcer jobs * Fixed not being able to assign/unassign leader (by clicking portrait) from fleet manager view * Fixed literally unplayable typos in certain Italian names in the human namelist * Fixed a case where a build outpost command inside space you already own would wrongly claim you were trying to build in another empire's territory * Finally got around to adding a proper confirmation click sound when adding claims on the galaxy map * Fixed cases where pop growth would not overflow properly after a new pop is spawned (99+3 used to = 100), causing all sorts of weirdness with pop growth modifiers * Fixed cases where science ships on auto-explore would just stop, or randomly choose a crazy indirect path to the next unexplored system * Fixed the supply ship wreckage event to not fire if the other party is a genocidal empire, since it makes little sense for them * Fixed Expansionist Overtures leader agenda appearing before you've made contact with any other empires * Fixed an issue where a Fallen Empire's Shielded World would not spawn * You can now build multiple habitats at the same time, in the same system * Fixed the "Ships Lost" outcome of the Fleet Maneuvers event sometimes not having any effect, by preventing it firing if there are too few ships in the fleet to destroy * Updated the text in some of the Synth Uprising events to better convey the scale of the disaster, since while we'll never tell how many beings compose a Pop, it's probably more than a dozen * Removed nonfunctional and unintended "merge fleets" button for things like the lost amoeba, that are not supposed to merge with normal fleets * Fixed a pathfinding issue that would cause fleet to not move towards their destination * Fixed ship losses not being correctly counted in the battle list in the war overview * Fixed a bug from 2016 (!) where if you split a fleet, then tried to drag-box select both, only one would be picked * Atomic clock follow-up anomaly rewards that grant Engineering deposits will now correctly convert any existing Mining Stations into Research Stations * Fixed duplicate component slot and moved slots around on the Automated Dreadnought * Fixed bug where deposits granting districts wouldn't actually grant the districts until a game reload * Bonus minerals from planet modifiers will no longer overwrite the dragon hoard * Fixed bountiful plains (level 1 food deposit) not showing up on savannah worlds * Fixed workers abandoning the mines to displace specialists, leading to basic resource starvation and a lot of unemployed high strata pops later in the game. No social mobility for you! * No longer possible to sometimes rival countries that have pathetic relative power * Made sure to cull the old, empty lost amoeba fleet from the fleet manager as the amoeba matures * Ensured capital buildings can convert to the correct type when a planet of primitives/machines/hive minds is taken over by another empire type * AH4B from Distant Stars can no longer change composition to prevent naval capacity bypass exploit * Dead/killed slaves are now properly culled from the slave market, so no more invalid entries, you heartless monsters * Added checks to help ensure that buildings specific to one empire type are properly destroyed/converted when the world is taken over by a different empire type * Fixed primitives and fallen/awakened empire pops not being purged by the Prethoryn and Contingency (Valar Morghulis) * Fixed the Horizon Signal's "waiting world" events erroneously occurring on Ecumenopolises * Coloniziable planets will no longer be clear-cut and paved over to hold a single mineral or energy deposit by survey teams who become over-excited at their planet modifiers * Caravaneer weapons should no longer appear at game start * Fixed pop growth bravely continuing even while the planet was being purged by the Prethoryn * Fixed coming across the Caravansary home base (before encountering a Caravaneer Fleet) not giving you communications with them * Added fixes for more cases where the Scourge would sometimes stop expanding * Fixed Contingency and Scourge not being able to purge the final pop on an occupied planet, because thoroughness is important * Fixed An Odd Factor event triggering even if no pop had the Odd Factory Worker job, and pops not actually being removed by event despite claims to the contrary * Fixed broken pirate ship turret graphics
As mentioned before, we're also putting out a new open beta version for you bold souls who want to get first access to the next round of fixes and improvements. 2.2.6 is available now on the stellaris_test beta branch, as well as being the release version on Paradoxplaza and Good Old Games. If you are playing on Steam and want to multiplayer with friends on Plaza or GoG, you need to be on this beta version.

2.2.6 has a new, reworked planet management screen, with the objective of making it easier to see relevant info about a world and make informed decisions. We think it'll make handling your economy and population easier, so please give it a try. 2.2.6 features a completely redone the ship upgrade system, making it so ships are upgraded individually, on a ship-by-ship, shipyard-by-shipyard basis. No longer will interrupting an upgrade order cancel upgrade progress for the entire fleet. We also included improvements to the economic and military AI. AI empires should now be much less passive, more competent opponent in war.

To read the full 2.2.6 beta patch notes, head over to the full patch notes post[forum.paradoxplaza.com] on our official forums.