by Eladrin

Hello everyone!

The ‘Gemini’ 3.8.4 update has been released today. In it, we’ve continued post-release balance work. Some of the bigger changes in the release include the conversion of several leader traits into Council Traits either to reduce micromanagement (moving a governor from planet to planet to maximize benefits of some traits) or to address undesired stacking issues.

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Balance

• Rebalanced a number of leader traits: Some general and governor traits that previously encouraged moving leaders from planet to planet have been made council traits or had their modifiers changed to discourage this. Resource production traits now require the leader to have at least level 2 to gain the first tier.
• Empire Size now has a floor of 50, and thus can no longer go negative.
• Increased the bombardment effectiveness of large fleets.
• The base rate at which Raiding bombardment steals pops has been dramatically reduced. Each army present on a planet will also protect 2 pops from being vulnerable to Raiding bombardment. (Raiding bombardment is always unable to steal the last pop of a colony)
• Renormalised political power from living standards and reduced base faction unity gain to better fit intended unity production. The Shared Burdens civic no longer grants an increase to the base unity of the Egalitarian faction, as the benefit is now rolled into their living standards.
• Sequential End-Game Crises now get +2 strength multipliers instead of +1.5.
• The Khan now has terrifying admiral traits.
• The opinion modifier from Defender of the Galaxy now only affects normal, non-fallen/awakened, empires that are capable of independent diplomacy.
• Colonists now increase planetary build speed by 10% instead of creating defensive armies.

AI

• Fixed AI hiring a governor without having a planet to assign them to.
• Fixed AI hiring scientists without having science ships to assign them to.

Bugfixes

• Broken Shackles Origin event “Homesick” no longer casts affected Pops into the void
• Adjusted width of MP lobby chat entries so that they don’t overlap the scroll bar.
• Council Agenda Costs now benefit from Empire Size Effect modifiers.
• Cyborg general trait will now add +2 combat width, as stated in the tooltip
• Empires with the Under One Ruler origin no longer ignore the initial 20 year cooldown on government reform.
• Federation project Flocks of Cloud should no longer get stuck ad infinitum in the situation log
• Fixed an error in which you may have been prevented from using Operation Crisis Beacon again – beyond the intended 4-year lockout period – if said Operation was aborted after confirming its target.
• Fixed duplicate tradition names in French
• Fixed Imperial Heirs not having a starting leader trait.
• Fixed queued move orders from a system with an FTL inhibitor not being displayed correctly.
• Fixed randomly generated empires having DLC-locked civics.
• Fixed randomly generated species having DLC-locked traits.
• Fixed randomly generated species having invalid trait and climate preference combinations.
• Fixed randomly generated species not having enough traits if it has traits (such as Aquatic) that are required by something else.
• Fixed the bonus leader trait from Aptitude Traditions not applying to Imperial Heirs.
• Fixed tooltip for Beacon of Liberty and Fanatic Purifiers, now they do mention that they are incompatible with Crusader Spirit
• Imperial Heirs are excluded from the effects of The Orb.
• Imperial Heirs that are generals or admirals in empires with Distinguished Admiralty now benefit from the +2 starting level.
• Invalid civics will get removed when authority is changed through event for Under One Rule
• Leaders excluded from the upkeep cost now correctly produce resources
• Pharma State civic is now correctly blocked by Payback and Broken Shackles.
• Removed DLC lock on some faction demands that were introduced in 3.8
• Set the AI weight for reorganizing the council to 0.
• Void Dweller MegaCorps with the Pharma State civic now correctly replace their starting Holo-Theaters with a Gene Clinic, unless they also have Permanent Employment (in which case it is replaced with the Employment Center).
• Warform no longer has the synth trait and has the second tier of the skirmisher trait.

Improvements

• Imperial Heirs are now up to 10 years younger than regular leaders of the same species. Starting Imperial Rulers are now up to 15 years older than regular leaders of the same species.
• Imperial Heirs that benefit from bonus starting levels now have selectable traits for those levels for owners of Galactic Paragons.
• Imperial Rulers and Heirs now have a 5% chance to start with a negative trait and an additional positive trait. The Philosopher King civic negates this.

UI

• Fixed leader portrait clipping in the level up window.
• Fixed position of Speech To Text button in the MP lobby.
• Fixed width of MP lobby chat text for large fonts and text to speech.
• If a player in your coop group adds a leader trait while you have the level up window open and there are no more traits to add, it will show the last selection.
• Reworked the planet occupation icon frame
• Selecting a ship by clicking it will now ignore its bounding box if it has a collision mesh.

Modding

• Empire size string now uses the actual defines instead of localized numbers for its message.
• Made it possible to set what leader portrait container to use for each location of the new portraits
• Made reload_gui console command more stable

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More changes to leader traits and some of the mechanics surrounding them will be coming in 3.9 in the fall. We’re placing some of the ideas and suggestions we’ve received into our “Summer Experimentation” bucket and we’ll see which ones pan out.

At this point we feel that 3.8 Gemini is in a stable state, and barring the need for a 3.8.5 hotfix, the next planned release will be 3.9 Caelum. (Caelum, “the Chisel”, represents a sculptor’s tools. Perfect for a balancing and polish update.)

A pass has been done on living standard political power and unity generation to normalize them when compared with one another – living standards like Shared Burdens and Utopian Abundance were not generating enough, while Academic Privilege was previously the “champion of Unity” – a little odd for the Materialist living standard.

After these changes, Utopian Abundance should be at the top of the charts, followed by Shared Burdens. (Which no longer needs the “double Unity from the Egalitarian faction” crutch.)

These changes have gone live in today’s update.

A few people [ed: a few?!?] have discussed the tendency of late game systems to become flooded with extreme numbers of habitats. We have some ideas on different ways to curb this behavior while still ensuring that habitats are thematic and effective, especially in the hands of Void Dwellers.

I’ll have a broader feedback discussion later on during the summer where we present some of our ideas, discuss how experiments with them went, and collect additional feedback from the community.

Stellaris with a Twist is our streaming event, where Ep3o and AlphaYangDelete play co-op multiplayer, and try to accomplish goals suggested and chosen by the Community.

If you have a suggestion for the final stream’s goals, you can submit it here, and if you’ve missed part of this event you can get caught up here!

The last session of Stellaris with a Twist is next week, at 1500 CEST! Don’t miss the exciting conclusion and find out which of our streamers will accomplish their Community-Suggested Goals for the Stream!

But wait, there’s more!

What’s better than having a galaxy full of wonder to explore? Conquering that galaxy with a friend, obviously!

From June 22nd to June 26th, Stellaris will be Free to Play; there will never be a better time to introduce a friend to Stellaris — and with the addition of co-op, you can now work together to conquer liberate the galaxy like never before.

In Stellaris multiplayer, the host’s DLC is shared between all the players in the game — the same holds true for co-op, even if one of the players is playing for free. So grab a friend, your planet cracker, and be sure to play during the Free to Play weekend! Thinking of trying Stellaris for the first time during the Free to Play, but don’t know where to start? Join us on Discord; from the 22nd to the 26th, our Player Helpers will be running “Learn to Play” Stellaris sessions!

That’s it for this week, see you next week!