by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
I hope that you all had a pleasant holiday season, and want to start off by thanking everyone that submitted feedback regarding the Technology Open Beta. That data we gained from these experiments was invaluable, so let’s get right into it.
As expected, the players that responded to the survey were overwhelmingly passionate players that have a ton of experience with the game. Nearly 70% of responses come from players that have over 1,000 hours played in the game. This is somewhat natural for an opt-in beta over the holidays with an intimidating feedback form, so I wanted to thank you all again for filling it out.
There was a strong consensus around the military changes (ship cost and upkeep), so we’ll likely be keeping those mostly as-is.
The technology changes were naturally more controversial. Roughly 80% of responses believed that technology (especially at higher tiers) was overall too slow in the beta, but a majority still thought that the changes were beneficial to the game overall. Several of you pointed out that so many simultaneous changes compounded too strongly, and we agree. I was happy to see that your feedback matches our expectations – we expected that the Open Beta was tuned too harshly and that we would want to pull back from it before release.
The Open Beta also revealed several technical issues, including some major performance implications from how Breakthrough Technologies interacted with diplomacy.
Overall, I view the Technology Open Beta as a great success, and as such am taking the opportunity to update it and let it run for another few weeks, after which we will decide whether or not we want to continue experimentation, integrate it into 3.11 (or 3.12), or discard the initiative.
We concur that the original Open Beta went too hard on technology. We liked some of the things we were seeing, such as tier 3 and 4 technologies becoming more valuable for an extended part of the game, but felt that it delayed other critical parts too long. Breakthrough Technologies were interesting as a slowdown mechanic, but if kept would likely need some sort of temporary (non-technology or unity related) bonuses as some form of reward for the frontrunners. The excessively high costs for late tier techs pushed some critical technologies such as Ascension Theory or Mega-Engineering too late in the game, and certain undesirable behaviors (like ignoring research entirely) were too effective.
The updated Technology Open Beta should be up on stellaris_test now, with the following changes:
Feature
- Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs slider added to galaxy generation. This slider adjusts technology costs based on tier and game difficulty.
Beta
- Removed Breakthrough Technologies.
- Reverted base technology costs to their 3.10.4 values – the increased cost between tiers is now handled by the Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs slider.
- Removed the majority of Researcher Upkeep Modifiers introduced into the Open Beta.
- Reverted changes to Knights research output from the Open Beta.
Balance
- Tweaked the tiers of technologies that increase naval cap and fleet command limit.
- Reduced the amount of Naval Cap granted by technologies.
- Significant changes to Bio-Reactors:
- Bio-Reactors are now a tier 1 rare technology instead of a tier 0 technology
- Bio-Reactors now reduce the food output of farmer jobs and give them a small amount of energy output.
- Added a tier 2 Advanced Bio-Reactor technology and building.
- Advanced Bio-Reactors further reduce the food output of farmers in exchange for a small amount of exotic gas output.
- Decreased the amount of research produced by unemployed pops with Utopian Abundance.
- Event options in the Knights’ quest that improve their capital have been buffed to be better balanced compared to the options that improve knight jobs.
At player request, we have kept the older version of the Technology Open Beta available on stellaris_test_old. It will remain there until the release of 3.11 “Eridanus”.
One of the frequent points of feedback was that there was concern that newer players would be hit especially hard by the technology cost changes. We also recognize that different players have different desires for the pacing of the game, so we’ve added another slider to galaxy generation.
The Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs slider adjusts the base cost of technologies based on the difficulty of the game. Higher tiers of technology are affected to a greater degree than lower ones, so this slider essentially affects “tier width”. While this does overlap with the Technology Costs slider to a degree, it does so in a different way, so we consider each to have valid reasons to exist as separate sliders.
Disabling Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs will cause them to follow the 3.10.4 / Civilian difficulty curve. As with many other galaxy generation sliders, the Stellaris team will be balancing the game around the Normal setting.
Tech Curves of basic technologies on “Normal” scaling, at different difficulty levels.
The base cost of technologies is now based on 3.10.4’s formula, y=1000*2^x, multiplied by the difficulty modifier of 1 + (q*x*d), where x=technology tier, q=difficulty adjusted tech cost galaxy setting (0 – 0.10, default 0.05), and d=difficulty (Civilian = 0, Grand Admiral = 6). 
TierXCost1 technologies at different difficulties, on “Normal” scaling (q=0.05).
For the players that enjoyed the larger amount of distance between tech tiers, scaling can go up to a maximum of “Extreme”, which gives Grand Admiral a curve that is similar to, but not exactly, the Open Beta numbers. Note that technology acquisition will still be faster than the old Open Beta as we’ve removed Breakthrough Technologies. 
Tech Curves of basic technologies on “Extreme” scaling, at different difficulty levels.
TierXCost1 technologies at different difficulties, on “Extreme” scaling (q=0.10).
Previous Open Beta values for reference.
We have a new feedback form for this version of the Open Beta, available here. As with the previous version, you can respond multiple times if you have different thoughts after different playthroughs. Please let us know what you think, and whether you think we’ve gone back too far in the other direction.
Currently we’re planning on collecting feedback from this phase of the Technology Open Beta for two weeks, until the 1st of February, but will leave the branches available until the 3.11 “Eridanus” update releases later on in the quarter.
See you all next week!
Please note that the Technology 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 – Technology Open Beta” branch.
Please disable mods for the Technology Open Beta, they are likely to break.
In-progress games should continue on the “stellaris_test_old” branch.
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[MrFreake enters to highjack the post]
Hello everyone!
Here I am again, not reading the room. Eladrin is talking about turning off your mods, and I’m here telling you to download more mods: buuuut….
Want a sneak peek at the Legendary Leaders included in #MODJAM2024? Check out the feature video:
Voting for favorite mod will run until February 11th, so there’s still plenty of time to play and vote for your favorite submission here!
