Being a full decade old hasn’t slowed Stellaris down. It’s now been two months since the launch of Nomads, and developer Paradox Interactive is in the process of beta testing for the Stellaris 4.5 update, dubbed ‘Cygnus.’ During the heat of the summer months, however, the team has taken some time to get a little more experimental, getting creative with several concepts “that may or may not make it” into the space game. Before it makes any of those final calls, however, it wants to show off what it’s been working on.
The new Stellaris developer diary starts with a caveat from Game Director Stephen Muray: “Everything shown below is not guaranteed to make it into the game, and even if it does, we don’t have a timeline at this point.” He stresses, “even if features look fairly polished, everything is a rough draft and none of this has been reviewed, playtested, or verified by QA.” With that established, he hands over to Game Designer Alfray Stryke to discuss what the team has cooked up of late.
First on the list is the option to add ‘harvesting rights’ to trade deals, which Stryke notes has been “a frequent request” for nomadic empires. While they would be able to sign such deals with multiple different settled empires in return for an agreed percentage of the harvested resources, any settled empires taking the deal would be locked into an exclusivity window for its duration.
The Infernals species pack introduced the concept of megastructure overclocking, and Paradox has “been looking at improvements that can be made to existing megastructures.” Its new test candidate for this is the Arc Furnace: once brought to tier three, it would unlock a wider variety of smelting processes beyond just alloy production, allowing you to tune its output to your needs.
“The hope is that the code changes that enable these improvements will let both us developers and our modding community make megastructures more interesting in future patches,” Stryke remarks. They add that the team has also been exploring the idea of bundling megastructure limits along with starbase and waystation capacity into a single ‘structure capacity’ value.
With Stellaris 4.5 bringing more granular control over auto-designers, the next “natural extension” would be the ability to direct how mercenary enclaves build their fleets. This would present you with more options to encourage them towards expanding their size, embracing your technology, or following specific combat doctrines.
In the current build, randomized flags used by computer-controlled empires have a fairly limited color palette (Stryke explains this was defined back when the game used approximately 20 versus the roughly 70 now available). Paradox is considering lifting these restrictions to offer a wider spread of options. This would also impact mercenary enclaves, which would combine their own emblem with inherited colors from their current patron.
“After we showed off the flag emblem work to our UX Designer, she felt that the flag designer in empire creation needed a bit of polish,” Stryke says. “One thing led to another and then Iggy came up with the idea, ‘what if you can edit your flag in game?'” With that extension of the system in mind, the team then turned to discussions like, “What if you could edit your subjects’ flags, or the flags of those you’ve humiliated in war?”
Said UX Designer has also been experimenting with further improvements to the empire creation menus. The goal was “to use the space more efficiently,” and includes a bigger city and room view up top with the details below. When you move into edit mode, you’ll be given a clean summary of all the essentials in the top corner as you adjust your faction’s authority, ethics, and civics. They’re also experimenting with “collapsible categories for the many, many empires we have to select from.”
What about generating a random empire? As things stand, the randomizer shuffles the whole thing at once, with only the names available to reroll separately. To solve this, developer ‘pthooie’ slapped individual randomization buttons onto all of the individual elements such as ethics, civics, traits, and the individual components of your starting ruler. If you don’t want to completely throw caution to the wind, you can select some before rolling the dice, and they won’t be removed when the remaining ones are chosen.
Stellaris 4.3 reduced ship counts across the game by increasing naval capacity, “with the exception of nanite swarms.” The reasoning was simple: while they caused a similar issue, the “player fantasy of bloating out an entire star system” was too good to lose. Now, the team has concepted a solution: “+500% ship per ship.” Using some “creative reimagining of how ship sections were supposed to work,” you’ll see multiple ships in game for what is considered just a single instance for calculation purposes.
Last but certainly not least, we come to espionage, a system that has long been on the waiting list to get some love. Developer ‘Cosmogone’ comments that they “have wanted to improve our espionage system ever since I was hired, five years ago.” They have chipped away at it bit by bit in each year’s summer session, “and this year is the year where it all coalesced into something that’s looking about ready to test.”
Espionage in Stellaris has long been considered fairly underpowered, requiring a lot of work to produce lackluster rewards. Cosmogone explains that the thinking here “was that it could easily become frustrating to get ganged up by several other empires,” so this potential issue had to be solved first in order “to lay healthier foundations for the system.” Enter ‘vigilance,’ a new value assigned to every empire tracking how alert they are to hostile spycraft.
“Every time an operation is completed, vigilance increases. It then slowly decays back down to its base value as things return to normal.” Should it climb above certain thresholds, it can cause a range of ‘vigilance events’ to occur that could either create negative consequences on active spy networks or assist the defending empire. You might see assets destroyed, envoys eliminated, or even the entire network lost at the highest levels.
If you’re the only active spy in an area, vigilance shouldn’t climb too fast, but if multiple factions are all targeting a single empire, then those consequences will be much harder to avoid. The new system enabled Cosmogone “to create more impactful operations, despite the risk,” so they then moved on to buffing the existing operations. “The list is long, but it’s things like letting ‘Sabotage Starbase’ actually deal damage, giving you a precise choice of target for ‘Smear Campaign,’ and enabling asset sacrificing for extra effects in the operations that were missing them.”
The potential gap between encryption and codebreaking has been broadened, rewarding you more for outpacing your targets. This necessitated some more ways to protect yourself, which “took the form of a series of leader traits, an edict, and various modifiers.” Alongside all of that work came the other essential pieces to overhauling espionage at a fundamental level, including general rebalancing, edge-case fixes, and other more specific tweaks.
Last but not least came some additional quality of life to help espionage really feel like a core part of the experience. That includes new sub-category icons for operations, detailed spy network operations in the outliner, and a counter-intelligence tracker in the top bar. “This one is likely to change, but there was previously no way for you to know exactly how much encryption and codebreaking you had, let alone vigilance.”
That’s all for this wander through the highlights of the Stellaris team’s latest summer of experimentation. “Hopefully these changes will set us up to do cooler espionage things in the future,” Cosmogone concludes, “but regardless, it will all need more testing and tweaking before it is ready to play.” A final reminder, then, that none of these features are set in stone to make it into the full game – but espionage in particular certainly seems like it’s moving in the right direction to do so.
