[2021] Stellaris Dev Diary #234 - Aquatics is out, what now?

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

written by grekulf


Come all you young spacefarers, listen to me! I’ll sing you the song of this dev diary!


Space shanty? Sing-along version? Amazing.

Today we’re back with another dev diary, and today we’ll be talking a little bit about our next steps. But first and foremost I’d like to thank everyone in the community for showing such great appreciation for Aquatics and the 3.2 update. The Aquatics Species Pack is the best-selling species pack to date, and going by the Steam review it also seems like it’s very well-liked. The future is looking bright, and together we will be able to make Stellaris bigger and better than ever before!

Speaking of the future, let’s take a look at what we have on the horizon for the game.

Unity Rework
Back in dev diary 215 we mentioned a Unity rework that we’ve been working on. Progress is fairly good, and we’ve made some interesting changes that we’ll be talking about SoonTM. The target for this change is currently the 3.3 February Update, but due to the spiciness of the changes, we’re also looking into the possibility of making an open beta with the changes earlier than that, so that we can include more community feedback for the 3.3 February Update. You’ll be getting more information about the details of the unity rework and a possible open beta as we get closer to the end of the year.

AI
We’re very happy to see that many of you have reacted positively to the AI improvements done in 3.2, and we appreciate your feedback and help. We still have a lot of more changes we’re working on, such as additional economic improvements and taking a look at the Take Point feature, to only mention some examples. Just like with the Unity rework, we’ll be talking more about these in detail in the near future.

Situations
We are looking into creating a new Situations system, similar to the Disasters system in EU4. The goal is to be able to move things like Deficits and Revolts, and similar struggles, into this new system. Since we don’t want to undertake too many changes at once, it’s likely that new Situations will be added over multiple updates after the system itself is released. Although work has started very recently, we’re very much looking forward to being able to share more progress about this in the future as well.

Buffing the Backlog
In terms of adding new content to older DLC, the priorities going forward will be to buff Nemesis and Necroids. We have no concrete plans we’re ready to share yet, but if you have thoughts for additions you’d love to see, please let us know!

And more…!
There’s a slew of other improvements, bug fixes, content additions to look forward to in future updates. I can’t really mention them all, because in all honesty, a lot of things like this aren’t planned and happen because we have a passionate team that works on many small things they think would make you, the players, happy!

----------

That is all for this week folks!

Here’s also the transcript from the Discord Q&A session we held last week.[forum.paradoxplaza.com]