[2023] Stellaris Dev Diary #295 - Armies, Sectors, Messages, and More

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

by Eladrin

Hi everyone!

The 3.8 ‘Gemini’ Coop Open Beta we talked about last week is now open! See this message[forum.paradoxplaza.com] for more details. We’ll be collecting feedback [forum.paradoxplaza.com]and Out of Sync errors[forum.paradoxplaza.com] until the end of April.

Please note that the 3.8 "Gemini" Coop Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it.

Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test - 3.8 Coop Open Beta" branch.
Don't forget to turn off your mods, they will break.
This week, we’ll be exploring some of the improvements that aren’t in the Coop Open Beta, but are planned for the full 3.8 release. Here are Offe and kc to tell you all about them!

<Insert Human Greetings> Hello again, it’s me Offe, today I will share some information about what I have been working on since my previous Dev Diary about AI. Today I have seven smaller side projects to present that will be coming with the 3.8 free patch: Army Builder, Rally Troops, Ground combat and Bombardment Tweaks, Science Ship Automation, Capital World Designations, Fleet Manager Improvements and Sector Editor.

First I have three changes related to Ground Combat and Orbital Bombardment, seeing how the community is split between a ground combat rework or removing it completely, I opted to instead make everyone disappointed and give you what no one asked for: Quality of Life and slight rebalance.

Army Builder​

First up is the Army Builder, this is a tool designed to make it much easier to build and gather Assault Armies for an upcoming war. This tab is available on any starbase in a sector, and armies recruited via this tab will gather at the starbase.


Note: It's moved one tab to the left since this screenshot was taken.

Construction is spread out across all planets in the sector and there is also a CTRL-click option to more quickly queue up more construction.



In cases where you would like to reinforce an existing fleet of Assault Armies instead of simply gathering them at a starbase I’ve also added a mode for assault army fleets called Rally Troops. New troops will then automatically try and merge with this fleet regardless if they are built via the Army Builder or by the old method of recruitment from a planet.



Speaking of planets, I’ve also added a Deploy In Orbit checkbox to planets for the use case where you want to recruit assault armies to defend a planet on the frontier without them first deploying in orbit meaning you then have to manually go back and land those troops afterwards.



Bombardment Changes​

Next up is changes to bombardment, if you really hate ground combat then I got good news for you. Orbital Bombardment will now be able to take control of planets, in most cases, when they have completely killed all defending troops. There are some exceptions, for example, your pops will never surrender to an enemy that are Fanatical Purifiers as they would be purged anyway.



There is also a policy where you can refuse enemy planets that would like to surrender to you, however, your defenceless planets will still prefer to surrender to non genocidal/hive minds enemies to spare their own lives.



Further there are some tweaks to ground combat and orbital bombardments to create a trade off between bombing and invading:

• Bombarding planets is much more devastating than it used to be, more pops will die and buildings and districts will be ruined in the process. This also adds a trade off between the different bombardment stances, doing selective bombardment will be slower but fewer pops will die in the process compared to indiscriminate bombardment.
  
• Orbital Bombardment will now scale with the amount of ships bombarding, the first 100 fleet size ships will do full damage, after that each additional 100 fleet size will add 70% of that efficiency. For example, 300 fleet capacity worth of ships will deal 100% + 70% + (0,7^2 = 49%) = 219% total worth of bombardment damage.
  
• This effect is scaled based on the number of pops/buildings and planet’s size, where highly populated small planets will suffer greater losses compared to large sparsely populated planets.
  
• Ground Combat is also more devastating to planets than it used to be, but much less so than bombarding.
  
• The effect of collateral damage from different army types have also been adjusted, previously the collateral damage on army types was a linear value and not a multiplier, which meant that in practice high damage high collateral units like Xenomorphs could effectively do less collateral damage on the planet compared to normal troops because they would kill the enemy troops very quickly. This is no longer the case as the collateral damage modifier now acts as a multiplier on any damage dealt.
  
• Planetary Capital buildings now spawns 0/4/8/16 defensive armies for free based on the tier of the building.

To summarise the Design Philosophy of all the changes to ground combat and bombardment:

Ground Combat and orbital bombardment will now be a bigger part of the game since big planets will automatically have some defences. Building armies and using them to invade planets will be much easier by using the Army Builder and Rally Troops functionality. Small planets with 1-25 pops will be prime candidates to be taken by orbital bombardment alone, removing the need to have to manually invade each small insignificant planet or habitat.

Updated Science Ship Automation​

Previously I made the Construction Ship Automation and Planetary Automation Settings which was well received by the community so for 3.8 I’ve decided to also make improvements to the Science Ship Automation.



Now when you click on the Science Ship automation you can enable or disable the modules you like, Explore Systems simply mean exploring the galaxy by entering systems which will discover any planets and hyperlanes in there, the other settings should be self explanatory. The default settings are Explore Systems and Survey Systems which is the same functionality as before 3.8.

For Science Ships that are already automated you can see which modules they have enabled by hovering the automation button:



New Planetary Capital Designations​

I have gone a bit outside of my own designation as a Programmer and dabbled a bit with content design. There are 4 new Capital world designations coming in 3.8 for non hive minds. They are: Forge Capital, Factory Capital, Trade Capital and Capital Extraction World.

These designations are not part of the automatic colony designation system and your capital world will never change designation on its own, rather you must explicitly change the designation yourself in order to avoid instantaneous collapse of the player economy when unpausing the game.

They are not revolutionary in their design but rather they are the combined effects of the Capital Designation paired with a specialisation. So, for example, the Capital Forge world designation will give you all the bonuses as the normal Capital Designation, but instead of the +10% output to all jobs it gives +20% Metallurgist jobs output as well as shifting the Consumer Goods jobs into Alloy jobs like the other Forge Designations.



So for everyone like me who wanted to make a Forge, Factory, Trade or Base Resource Capital World, now you can.

Fleet Manager​

Overall the Fleet Manager serves its purpose and works, sort of. Together with KC (more from her later) we made some reorganisation of the UI and fixed some annoying bugs. Here is what the fleet manager looks like now:



Some notable changes are that the list of fleets is now much larger than it used to be, now you can see 12 simultaneous fleets instead of 6, there is a new button to copy a fleet template, you can now easily delete fleets templates by using the DELETE + ENTER keys and doing so will no longer select the first fleet in the list and scroll the scrollbar to the top.

The ship designer and the fleet managers have also been merged into one item in the sidebar and are accessible via tabs to easily be able to switch between them.

We’ve also added this new button which originally was designed and implemented for the AI but then I figured it is useful for players too:



Sector Editor​

Overlord really made us miss the ability to edit sectors, so better late than never I’ve made a tool which allows the player to freely move systems between adjacent sectors as long as they are in range of the Sector Capitals. The Sector Editor tool can be access either via the Planet view or the Planets and Sector view:



Opening the sector editor will enter into the sector edit map mode, here you can edit the sector either via the galaxy map icons or by using the UI on the left. While in the sector editor mode you can easily switch between editing different sectors by clicking on these icons in the galaxy map.



This comes with a few adjustments to requirements of creating Sectors, for example, it is no longer possible to create a sector that is too close to an existing Sector Capital even if the systems in between are unclaimed. Meaning it is no longer possible to release one of your guaranteed habitable worlds as a Vassal.

Further, all of the old counter intuitive rules regarding which planet would belong to which sector capital have been removed which previously resulted in very strange looking sectors when players would try to delete and recreate sectors to attempt to fix their sector borders.

Currently the sector editor gives a lot of control to the players, meaning it is even easier than before to create 1 system/planet vassals, but it is also now possible to fix sector border map gore. I trust everyone here will use this power responsibly.

But Wait There’s More!​
Hey everyone, I'm kc - your favourite UX designer you have never heard of. Usually working from the shadows up in Arctic, I have descended upon you to shed light on some more quality of life things we have been working on for the last few weeks.

Rebindable keys for the side menu, ok, not rebindable but close enough. We have made it possible to customise the order of the items in the menu and thus decide which of them will have the F1-F10 hotkeys. Technology? You got it!

Toggle edit mode by clicking on the little gear icon.



Message Onslaught​

Something of a pet peeve of mine since I started on Stellaris a couple of years ago, was the lack of different scales of urgency when the game presents information. Since everything is considered equally important, in order to cut through the noise every new message has to scream as loud as the others, or louder. This has led to the barrage of popups and notifications we all know and love, and love to hate.

So what we decided to do to fix this is of course to make even more notifications. OK, rather;

1. Make a new system to add even more different notifications
   
2. Allow you to disable notifications. Yes, Message Settings is coming to Stellaris.

The new notifications are called toast notifications (cue bread-related puns!) because of how they pop up and disappear automatically (like bread in a toaster.)

This system will be used to communicate things that are low priority, things you don't need to act on but might want to know about. And feedback on things you've done. Ding! Leader ready!





My hope is that we can convert old messages to use this system when it makes sense to do so (System Surveyed, Build Complete, etc.), as well as allow for customization on how different messages should be presented. Pick your poison! Or just turn it off completely.

Message settings can be accessed directly from the notification/toast you no longer wish to see, (by Ctrl-Clicking on it) or from the game menu, under Settings/Messages. Some messages, such as the toasts shown above, also have a cogwheel to adjust setings.





But Wait There’s More... More!​
No really, there’s actually more. But since this was chonky enough, I guess we’ll be back later. Stay tuned.

What’s Next​
We’ve got a lot left to go through before the Gemini release, so we’ll see you next Tuesday with our next Dev Diary.