written by Eladrin

Hi everyone, I hope you’ve had a wonderful summer.

Today we’ll start going into some of the things planned for the upcoming Stellaris 3.5 “Fornax” update.

With the improvements that have been made to the AI over the past few updates, we’ve noticed that new players are finding things a bit more challenging and there have been some requests for an easier difficulty setting. As such, we’re adding a Civilian difficulty setting, and making Cadet the default difficulty.

Civilian difficulty further increases the bonuses players receive in Cadet difficulty, with an additional bonus towards completing First Contact.

Now, we’re aware that most of you that read these dev diaries are looking for a greater challenge rather than the opposite, but we have some things for you as well.

Two new settings are being added that allow you to better customize the difficulty of your game.

Rather than being a simple toggle, Scaling Difficulty can now be set to Off, Mid Game, or Late Game – if set to Mid Game, AI bonuses will scale from zero to the selected difficulty by the Mid-Game Start Year. Late Game will provide the current behavior of scaling to the selected difficulty by the End-Game Start Year.

Difficulty Adjusted AI Modifiers is a new toggle that can dramatically increase the strength of the AI on higher difficulty levels as the game progresses. If enabled, the AI bonuses apply to all other modifiers the AI accumulates.

As an example, the Geothermal Fracking technology grants +20% Minerals from Miners. On Grand Admiral difficulty with this setting enabled, this technology would instead grant AI empires a 40% bonus.

Fornax will also bring one other tiny little addition to the galaxy generation settings for players looking for an extra challenge.

The Crisis Type setting will now have an option for All, which will spawn every crisis sequentially, with each subsequent crisis being stronger than the previous. The galaxy is counting on you. No pressure.

Stellaris achievements have always been a bit tongue in cheek and enjoyable to make, if not always enjoyable to complete. (I’m looking at you, Galatron achievements!)

We’ve submitted to the demands of our artists, and will be adding three achievements to each species pack that has previously been released.

While Stellaris achievements have traditionally always been careful to not require “cross-dlc”, we didn’t enforce that restriction to some of these since we felt that if you have all of the Species Packs you probably have everything else already.

Here’s one example from each.

Aquatics:

Fishing for Trouble – As an angler empire, provoke a Fallen Empire into declaring war on you and win.

Necroids:

There’s a Zombie on my Lawn – As a Necroid empire, eradicate a Plantoid empire, or vice-versa, without blowing up their final planet.

Lithoids:

Rock Beats Paper – As a Lithoid empire, show the Galactic Community exactly what you think of that strongly worded letter.

Humanoids:

Strange Mood – As a Master Crafter empire, fully construct a megastructure while you have a Covenant with a Shroud entity.

Plantoids:

DIY – As an Idyllic Bloom empire, convert the junk worlds of the Ketling Star Pack into Gaia Worlds.

Next week I’ll spoil more of the achievements, and go into some quality of life changes. Iggy will also give a compiled update on relic changes based on your feedback.

We’ll be a bit slow with replies to this dev diary as we’re currently at a staff conference. We’ll catch up as we can.

See you next week!