Sweet Cetana, there`s an ark ship with1 fleet power in our empire. Quess, we`re cooked

Playing Payback Origin, with the Minamar Specialized Industries (to the tune of Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated, let's be honest) added the civic Permanent Employment, which means pops are still employed well after they are dead.

Intro

I was looking forward to Willpower, a lot. However, today's dev diary appears to take the approach of treating ethics as monoliths, which only sands down the edges of external politics- quite the opposite of what we'd want this DLC to do.

I love politics in strategy games. Whether Stellaris or another 4x/GS game, I rarely declare war myself, rather focusing on managing a complex web of diplomatic relations- factions, vassals, rivals, and the Galactic Community. Managing the populace as well, though basically no game I've played focuses on this- Stellaris at least has some internal politics mechanics.

Therefore, I have been patiently awaiting a politics DLC for ages- internal or external, I'm hungry. My favourite DLC, easily, is Overlord for this reason, and I've been patiently waiting for something to scratch the itch harder since. So when Willpower was announced, I jumped for joy- screw Nomads, screw scenarios, I had tunnel-vision- there's only one thing I need from Season 10 and that is politics!

My Political Dream

There had been good signs up to this point. For one, in 3.11, factions were given the ability to hold multiple ethics at once. This was good news, as the static nature of Stellaris' factions always bothered me- they weren't dynamic or immersive. While the coat of paint changed, they were basically the same for every country with the same ethics and Issues- I longed to see a system where factions had two ethics (or a fanatic ethic) each that could possibly change, and dynamic Issues based on their ethic crossover and your current gamestate.

3.11 also did away with faction leaders, which I would ideally one day like to see return in an internal politics update, but Paragons had already done leaps and bounds improvements on that. The new faction ethics functionally changed little, but they signaled hope for what could be to come.

My dream was to see situations such as this: As a xenophile-militarist country, you may have two separate militarist factions splitting your militarist voting block; you may be forced to choose between promoting a xenophile-egalitarian or xenophile-authoritarian faction; or your xenophile party may even switch to being pacifist, forcing you to pick between promotion or suppression. A faction's demands could even change over time, as their ethics, their leader, the gamestate changes, keeping you on your toes.

Point being, what I longed to see in politics (in this example, internal) was:

• Represent the crossover between different ethics and how they interact
• Encourage the player to make difficult decisions about your society
• Be dynamic and changing in reaction to the above, responding to changing ethics and player choices

Of course, external ideological politics would ideally follow the same outline. Stellaris already is great in that regard- I love, for instance, how you get three trait points that force you to never be one-note- you may be fanatic in one ethic, but you've always got to choose a second minor ethic to balance it out. Two fanatic egalitarian countries may see eye to eye in many ways, but may also have very different opinions on xenophilia/phobia, or materialism V spiritualism.

An ideology system would ideally take this further- allowing you to craft your own sci-fi belief system that takes elements from more than one ethic to create a distinctive identity. So when Willpower was announced, I was ecstatic- finally this dream could, at least in part, be realised.

Last Week- The Announcement

So when the DLC's features were announced last week, I came away with a bit of the wind out of my sails. To the point, because of Absolute Ethics. As said, the fact Stellaris forces you to have at least two ethics is a complete strength, as it encourages diversity (sorry xenophobes)- an Absolute Ethic, imo, is sanding down the edges of your country to make it utterly one-note.

Now, I'm not against this entirely. To play a silly extremist gimmick country sounds fun. I'd much prefer the ability to unlock another ethic point (like you unlock civic points) later in the game as a feature, but I'm also not against Absolute Ethics ever being implemented. What worried me, rather, was that it signaled an approach to the ethics system the DLC would take that simply appeals to me significantly less: centering ethics as monoliths. I held my breath though, waiting to be proven wrong.

I'm afraid I was right.

Today- Ideologies

There's a lot of hype for today's announcement, but I am afraid I came away disappointed.

Firstly, the Fanatic Factions.

Well, I think they are a neat idea in context- if factions themselves were more dynamic and varied, it'd make sense that some of them would be fanatic. But as it is, it seems they are just taking the already lackluster and boring factions and wiping away the very little remaining sauce they had.

And the worst news- they are essential to forming ideologies!

Ideologies are entirely one-note. They are defined- it appears at least- by a singular ethic, with that ethic supplying a list of tenets. There is, ultimately, very little two Authoritarian Ideologies have to set themselves apart, other than these tenets, which themselves appear to just be a choice of mechanical bonuses. Two Spiritualist Ideologies are functionally significantly less different than one's choice of shroud patron- meaning Shadows of the Shroud is probably the closest we'll ever get to the religion system people have been begging for for years to give spiritualists some sauce!

That's all the system is, really- a new Shroud Aura system, except now there are eight patrons rather than five and you get to customise the bonuses. Woop. From what it appears, your ideology will oppose exactly 1 out of every 8 others, but have no substantial interactions with the others. Rather than adding diversity to Stellaris' politics, it's homogenising it.

Waiting and Seeing

Of course, there is an element of 'wait and see' to all this. We've yet to see what future dev diaries have to say. Ultimately, however, the foundations we've seen today suggest their creative direction is simply going off in the complete opposite direction to what I think would be interesting.

That being said, the one way this could be salvageable, by my reckoning, is in the tenets system. If you are able to select tenets based on your country's ethic rather than just from your ideology- and if these tenets change your ideology's relationship with other ideologies (a materialist tenet causing friction in a spiritualist country, for instance), then my interest may be brought back on board. However, from what we saw today, it appears tenets are exclusive to each ideology- I can only hope this is simply just for ease of demonstration in the dev diary, otherwise it will be really, really boring.

Unfortunately, dev diaries today are better, more complete than they used to be- unfortunate as they are usually quite clear on what to expect, being mostly feature-complete and rarely leaving room for surprises. Which is great if they're filled with hype moments- but I'm only left dreading that what we saw today is all we'll get. Gestalts, Diplomacy, and Espionage are all to come, but when it comes to Ideologies, future dev diaries are likely to only flesh out the nitty-gritty.

But I will wait and see. I don't want to wish this to be the first DLC to outright disappoint me, but today's dev diary only dampened by momentum for it- to use its own terminology! I hope it can be salvaged. I'll wait and see.

^{A.I. Disclaimer: I am broadly an A.I. skeptic, and appreciate transparency when it is used to any degree. For full transparency, the complete first draft of this post was entirely human-written, but I then had Claude go over it to check spelling, grammar, suggest formatting, and offering suggestions- ironing out kinks. No text was directly generated by the LLM, but it was involved in the writing process to review- though the real reviewer is you, the human reader, whose opinion is the only one that ultimately matters.}

Well shit.

In 4X games the game AI tends to see unoccupied space as unowned space. This often results in behavior no human would mistake as diplomatically acceptable, for example a friendly or weaker state in a Civ game colonizing a land mass otherwise wholly owned by the player. A human would see a large island or small continent, heavily but not completely populated by a friend, as belonging to that friend. An AI just sees an open spot and says “this is an acceptable place to expand”.

In Stellaris this manifests as empires expanding past obvious choke points into the well-established territory of other empires, even friendly empires. Less commonly, this even turns into leapfrogging to grab a stellar exclave within a friend’s enclosed area.

It is my view that this AI behavior doesn’t represent rational, informed behavior, that it is a result of the AI’s limitations, that it is disadvantageous for stable diplomacy and fun, that it caused border gore that players actually alter their gameplay to solve, and that it is therefore an issue to be mitigated if possible.

I suggest the following mitigation, that we allow placing Claims (as in the Claim) system on unoccupied star systems at a heavy discount. The intent is to allow the player to telegraph to the AI what stars they consider to be their own territory before they are ready to actually build outposts in those star systems.

Even for those who agree with this idea, there is room for nuance and reasonable disagreement about implementation details. I suggest an 80% discount (minimum 10 Influence) from the base price with a normally multiplying cost for each additional star. Adjacent system? 80% off. Three systems away? Base price times 3 times 0.2. Easy.

And if the system is occupied anyway? Then the claim persists on that system, and the occupier suffers an opinion loss with the claimant.

And in the AI logic, bias the AI a little against building an outpost in claimed systems. And in the UI, make obvious that a system is claimed when selecting to build an outpost there.

That is the minimum system. There’s room to add complexity, if desired. This is the room for debate.

Optional enhancement 1: It costs five or ten extra Influence to build an outpost in a claimed system.

Optional enhancement 2: Adjust Influence cost based on the stellar map. Reduce Influence cost for each hyperlane that leads directly, or only through unoccupied stars, to the claimant with no paths to other empires. Increase the cost for each hyperlane that leads directly or only through unoccupied stars to other empires, not to the claimant. This would make the claimant’s bottlenecks very inexpensive and other empire’s bottlenecks very expensive.

Optional enhancement 3: When biasing AI behavior, attempt to weight claims by distant claimants and claims against one’s own bottlenecks as less important than normal.

In general, I think there’s plenty of room to tweak details but there should be a system to assert and have recognized planned borders as long as the system is reasonable so that abusing it egregiously is not helpful.

Valve has just added steam achievement sets allowing developers to group DLC achievements into new DLC sets rather than remain with the base game's achievements. A couple of other Paradox games with lots of DLCs (Vic 3, CK3, and Age of Wonders 3) have already added DLC achievement sets. Would be great if Stellaris got the same treatment!

pre-ftl spaceship ignoring the BIG enigmatic cache

Stone age surface to space missiles.

Played around with star boosting (this was after 1 Stellar Ignition, 3 Deep Scans and 4 Mining Drones Scans), technically it can be repeated infinitely and since the Cybrex system only has one stellar body the Relic hits everytime.

Decided to post since I saw noone else posting similar before

was playing 1000 stars with no mods and I found an AI planet with a very familiar name

Read this post on the Paradox forums! | Dev replies here!

Hi everyone,

Today I'm turning things over to Atmaz to share some information about Ideologies in regular empires. (We'll talk about gestalt empires in another dev diary, we didn't forget about them!)

Here we go!

Introduction​

Hey folks.

I'm Gary Morris (Atmaz), DLC Director for the Willpower expansion from Abrakam Entertainment.

Since the release of Shadows of the Shroud, our team has been hard at work shaping the hearts, minds, and assorted cognitive organs of Stellaris' inhabitants. The end result is perhaps the most deeply integrated system we've developed for the game yet: Ideologies.

I'd go so far as to call it our most ambitious project to date, and there's a lot to talk about. So… let's get into it.

What are Ideologies?​

I could explain it all in dry, mechanical terms… but where's the fun in that? I think the best way to understand something is through a story, and Stellaris has no shortage of those.

Meet: The Blorg Cooperative

A Blorg species from yet another timeline. In this case, we're going to play as a Fanatic Xenophile, Pacifist variant of their breed. You'll notice they have one of the Willpower Civics that happens to be only available to Fanatic or Absolute Xenophiles, Open Stars Sovereignty. We'll get to what that is in a bit.

(Note, this is not a new pre-scripted empire, though Willpower has some of those too.)

Fanatic Factions

Factions have arisen!

One of the first differences you'll notice in Willpower are the existence of Fanatic Factions. These Faction types have both increased resource output and unmet demand disapproval rate, so you'll probably want to keep them happy. Since we started with a Fanatic Ethic, its associated faction (the Alien Aid Group) is already fanaticized, but it is possible for Factions to fanaticize in other ways if they have high support and approval rating for a long time.

Once a Fanatic faction exists, stronger convictions may begin to take hold…

The Rise of an Ideology

​It seems the Blorg are ready for us to adopt an official Ideology. The Alien Aid Group has prompted us to adopt their Xenophilic principles on a societal scale.

Doing this isn't free, and has a monthly upkeep of Influence to maintain, but it's your choice in the end. You can always do this from the Manage Faction menu, if you meet the requirements and have better timing in mind for this.

Our Ideology now has a visible footprint on the galaxy, seen here easily in the new Ideology Map Mode. Ideologies grow and spread from sources of populations such as colonies, and the intensity of their spread depends on a lot of things like Unity production, Amenities, Trade, and all kinds of other modifiers distributed throughout Stellaris's various systems. Basically, the more happy and productive Ideological followers you have, the faster and farther it will spread.

Here we are spreading our perfect belief system into the space of the Reyennan Regime, which will now be experiencing some Xenophilic Ethics attraction and the emergence of a new faction supporting Blorg Multiculturalism. This area covered by our Ideology, called Ideological Reach, also reduces Claim and Starbase Influence cost for systems outside of our borders, as well as reducing Starbase upkeep. You can feel safe within the shadow cast by our new flag. Speaking of…

Each Ideology is assigned its own flag, with a set of unique emblems for each Ethic type. You can also rename it to anything you like, in this case I am staying with one of the randomly generated possibilities for Xenophilic Ideologies.

Tenets​

So other than converting others to our Ethic and claim/starbase discounts, what are we getting from all of this?

Well first of all, by forming an ideology we have become an Ideological Authority which comes with some inherent bonuses. We'll stay the authority as long as no other empire adopts our Ideology and reaches a higher strength level and diplomatic weight.

One of the clearest advantages in having an Ideology are in benefiting from Ideological Tenets, which only the Ideology Authority can codify. To do this, we'll need to gain some Ideological Strength. Let's see how we're doing there.

Looks like we haven't encountered any other Ideologies yet, and that lit up hexagon means we can codify our first Tenet. Let's do that.

There are a wide variety of Tenets to choose from, and most are locked to particular Ethics. Certain Civics and Origins can generate their own as well, but our Blorg here happen to have these to choose from. If we don't like our options, we could always Reformulate them, which costs some Influence and time. In this case, I think Pluralism would go nicely with our Open Stars Sovereignty Civic.

Note that you normally get access to three Tenets in total, and each slot scales upward in Intensity. Meaning I could adopt a low level of Pluralism here, or save it for my third slot and have the modifiers scale accordingly. Not ALL modifiers scale this way, but most do. Regardless, what you see is what you get.

Open Stars Sovereignty

The Immigration Bureau, for these Blorg, is the ultimate friendship machine. You'll need to establish these on systems bordering foreign empires, but doing so will accumulate a diverse population on all your planets. Blorg like that sort of thing.

Gaining Followers​

While converting Pops happens naturally under our Ideological Reach, what we really like is when an entire empire adopts our Ideology. As the current Authority this will increase our bonus modifiers, but it's also an easy way to maintain positive relations. Empires sharing the same Ideology as you generally view you more favorably. Let's see if the Reyennans are ready yet.

Looks like the Reyennans want to be on the right side of history. Given time, they might have adopted it on their own, but we'll push them along a little faster this way.

Note that there are far more aggressive forms of forcing someone to adopt your Ideology, but surely not many Stellaris players will want to engage with those.

​Now that the Reyennans have adopted our Ideology, they too are now spreading its message across the stars. The bigger it gets, the happier we both are.

Ideological Momentum

Things seem to be going well so far, but one thing we'll want to keep an eye on is our Ideological Momentum. This tracks how well our Ideological Strength has been doing recently, and if this dips into the negative we risk negative modifiers or even worse: Ideological Revolts. These are like normal revolts, but may result in the generation of an opposing Ideology or the secession of several colonies at once. Surely we'll be fine!

…and there we have it, the story of the rise of Blorg Multiculturalism. This is only the beginning, however… we'll eventually encounter other Ideologies, and to win them over we might need some more powerful tools.

More to Come​

We've only covered the basics here today, and there's a lot more to talk about. We hope you like this initial look at what Ideologies offer, and we'll stick around to answer any questions you might have.

YouTuber War 3

For those of you who may have missed it, Stellaris YouTuber War 3 premiered this week on YouTube! Featuring a cast of your favorite Stellaris Content Creators - alongside some of our very own Developers - YouTuber War 3 is a strong continuation of a Stellaris classic.

[Watch Episode 1 of Stellaris YouTuber War 3.]

Join us on discord to watch the premiere of Episode 2, followed by a Q&A with some of the creators who participated!​

Thanks for reading, and see you around!

After 64 years, I have just now started a precursor chain

With Willpower focusing on the Ethics system, I think it is time to reevaluate how Megacorp governments work.

The problem

'Corporate' is currently a government Authority type - specifically, it's a modified variant of the Oligarchic Authority. That means that it cannot be taken by a Fanatic Egalitarian (who are limited to Democratic governments) or a Fanatic Authoritarian (who is limited to Dictatorial or Imperial). This limits gameplay and roleplay opportunities.

In addition, it means that megacorps are strangely limited to one particular fantasy when it comes to governance. Privately or family held companies are common in the cyberpunk fiction where the Megacorp trope comes from (for example, Arasaka from Cyberpunk 2077), and largely can't be created in Stellaris.

The solution

Megacorps should be a set of new authorities mirroring the regular individualist authorities. This would resolve both problems:

Fanatic Egalitarianism and Fanatic Authoritarianism could still limit the authority types as they do for regular empires, but one could still choose to play a Corporate authority.

Different authorities could then be flavoured around different types of corporate ownership.

New Authorities

All corporate authorities should retain the basic effects of the current Corporate authority: +50% Empire Size from planets, the Mercantile diplomatic stance, +1 envoy, and branch offices. However, they can have different bonuses otherwise.

Here are a few ideas for how varied megacorp authorities could be themed, though I would be interested in hearing other people's ideas.

• Public: Democratic elections for shareholder representatives. Provides the same cooldown resets on election as Democratic and +15% Faction Output.
• Managed: The current type, themed around a board of directors that aim to maximize profit. Provides +10% trade from jobs/contracts.
• Private: Dictatorial equivalent, elections on death. Themed around a strong governing vision, providing +50% Governing Ethics Attraction and +5% Manager output.
• Family-owned: Imperial equivalent, with the Company Director having a designated Successor. Themed around long-term planning, providing -15% influence cost for diplomatic agreements and espionage.

A researcher unit at base turns 1.5 consumer goods into 3 research, for a conversion rate of 2 research to 1 consumer good. Thus an artisan unit, which produces 6 consumer goods, can support the job upkeep of 4 researcher pop units. One of the specialized labs at tier 2 improves the output to 3.5 research at the same consumer goods upkeep, for a conversion rate of 2.33 research per consumer good.

The Research Institute adds another 0.5 to these jobs, but adds 1 extra consumer good in upkeep.

This means that without a laboratory, the conversion rate becomes 3.5 research for 2.5 consumer goods, at a rate of 1.4 research per consumer good. That's a 30% efficiency decrease. And now a pop unit of Artisans can't even keep 3 researcher pop units supplied.

With a laboratory, the conversion rate is 4 research for 2.5 consumer goods, for a rate of 1.6 research per consumer goods. That's a 32% decrease in scientist efficiency.

In fact, even if the Research Institute would get giga-buffed and now give the 0.5/0.5/05 buff to every researcher type individually, 4.5 research for 2.5 consumer goods is still a 10% decrease in researcher efficiency. Labbed, it's a 12.6% decrease in efficiency.

And before anyone asks, since these affect the base input/output, the efficiency ratio is not affected by the Research Supply Depot or Data-Driven Theorem Facility. With those you'll get more for less, but the rate between institute and no institute stays the same

So. Why. Does. This. Building. Exist?

Why. Is. It. A. Tech?!

Does nobody working on Stellaris have a calculator? Now it's not even the biggest sack of shit among high-end buildings (looking at you, Auto-Curating Vault), but why can't it not be more like the Ministry of Production?

I don't think it does anything but check out the effect of the second option.

i do like the flavor of mind over matter tough

I saw a lot of posts about people defeating 100000x crises or crazy resource stats.

I am a noob playing mostly for role playing purposes and I am looking for advice. I play normal builds, I never look for min-maxxing. Late game I have most of my planets specialized, try to ascend them etc.

Now, an example from my last play. UNE turned synthetic with ecumenopolis perk. I am year 2500, about 100 planets (terrible to manage, maybe here I can do something to take care of empire size penalties?) and my research rates are about 9-10k per research type. Normal resources are about 3k to 6k and unity is about 12k. A repeatable research level 10-12 takes a minimum of 30 months.

I am around the maximum level cap for fleets at 9999, I tried exceeding and by 13k-14k I go in the read with upkeep. Total fleet power is about 2 million.

My question is how is everyone going beyond this without huge min maxxing, mods or exploits? I saw repeatables completed in 1 month, fleets in the billions fleet power and resources at 20k per month. I understand some builds are better than others but playing other types of empires (normally) didn't get me too far from these values. So, taking my example above with UNE specificall, what can I do better?

To me, its overwhelmingly the early game. maybe a tad into the midgame.

starting to set up the empire, understand its origin, how its traits, civic, etc all work with each other, a bit or rp in choosing the most fitting ascension. climbing your way to the top of the galactic community, etc etc.

all brilliant, love it.

then you start to become a true powerhouse, (in my way of playing i dont focus much on military early on) and can take out the guardians, the mauraders, and any other empire is more a nuisance than anything but...

things start to get repetitive, any empire except FE are nothing, most of your eco is working fine, at most you have to add a few districts when the pops grow.

you can start to add gateways and megastructures and even colonize more planets but its truly just a "win more" at this point. same with making even more fleet.

sure, you can have a real goal of beating the FE and crises but, its so snowbally that you either did everything right 100 years ago and you will get there, is just a matter of time, or you were stomped in one way or another and will lose.

not to mention how the game starts to lag in the later stages so its both more boring (less things to do) and takes longer to "tick".

so i usually never even make it to the crises... i did a couple times to get the lore and stuff but... usually i just get bored of that empire and start wanting to start a new one until i just abandon the save.

what are your thoughts on this?

First of all, thank you for the work done and inspiration by BloodStainedCrow. From the beginning of my Stellaris playthroughs up until this day you are a pulsar in our tech tree nebulae.

I had my own local fork of it for a long time, but now since this age of AI and me being a software engineer, I wanted to have my own go at this. So I crafted and built something that I as a devote Stellaris player (call it Maniacal) player always wanted.

This is a personal project of my own, which I just want to share with you. As said I'm a (professional) software egineer this is just a hobby project. But any feedback is welcome. But first and foremost I hope this helps you with any of your playthrough, be it for min-maxing to beelining to techs, to just having better overview of your empire. I built this to how I use it, and would want to use it.

I hope you enjoy it.

https://ythibos.github.io/Stellaris-Tech-Tree/

If the docs or more importanly the tool itself are not clear on how to use it, then the docs and/or tool are wrong.
https://github.com/YThibos/Stellaris-Tech-Tree

Read it, use it, let me know about the look and feel. o7

Hey so I have like 30 years left until I believe the Crisis starts (and I believe one of my systems will be ground zero) so I'm starting to experiment with the ship system. This was the best thing I could come up with.

Hey folks! Enjoying my new 4.5 save, looking for your thoughts on wide vs tall and what's too wide? I see Empire size has been reworked a LOT and planets/colonies count for 20 size increase each...I generally like to play wide early then go tall, wondering if that is even feasible anymore (even with perks like Imperial Prerogative that reduce Empire size from planets by -25%). Question therefore - in 4.5, how wide is too wide? Anybody running a 10-15 planet empire and how are you doing it?

It nuked some of my worlds, but gifted me this beautiful beautiful screen, thx shatered

This is how every single one of my xenophile playthroughs end up like. I sign a migration treaty, i build perfect utopian worlds with high amenities and housing, i make sure the AI has unemployed pops on their worlds that can migrate and fill up my own planets and this is what i get.