written by grekulf
Hello everyone!
For today’s dev diary we’ll be talking a little bit about a new wave of changes coming in the upcoming 3.2 update.
3.2 will feature some new content and features, some of which didn’t make it into 3.1, and some of which are new. The reason why I mention that is because I also wanted to shed some light on the process itself. With this new way of working, it’s fine if something isn’t done for a certain update, because it can simply spill into the next update. With our ambition of only having 3 months between the updates, it will not be long before the new piece of content will be out in the public. Speaking of which, the new Pompous Purists Civic is just such an example.
Pompous Purists Civic
This civic was designed to be added to the Humanoids Species Pack with our Buffing the Backlog initiative, but it didn’t quite make it in time to be released in 3.1. In 3.2 you will be able to try out this new addition to the Humanoids Species Pack.
The Pompous Purists Civic is a civic that allows for a diplomatic playstyle, but for xenophobes. The idea is based on an elven fantasy, where they are willing to negotiate with other species, but only as long as it's on their own terms.
Friends? Maybe if you keep a respectable distance.
Ship Browser Experiment
Back in dev diary 213 we briefly talked about the improvements to a part of the empire creation process – namely the part of the UI where you select your ship appearance. The experiment meant that only about half of you got to experience those improvements, while the rest kept the ship appearance selection as it has looked like since 2016. The reason why we ran this improvement as an experiment is because we wanted to measure how successful doing these kinds of improvements can be.
The Ship Appearance part of the empire creation screen allows you to browse different ship sizes and appearances.
The improved ship browser will be available to everyone with the release of 3.2.
Now I’ll hand over to Victor who will be talking a little bit about some new content for anomalies.
Anomaly Variety
Hello everyone! I am Victor, a Custodian Content Designer that you might have seen around on the weekly streams these past few months.
Back in 2018, we removed anomaly failure from the game. This meant that every single time you encountered the Gigantic Skeleton anomaly category, you would always get the Gigantic Skeleton anomaly, for it was the only one in the category. No longer! As one of my tasks for this patch, I decided to simply go through every single anomaly category and add new anomalies to orphaned categories that I could for the development cycle.
This is not only limited to new anomalies, but I also revisited some old classics adding options to events that previous designers created before a lot of the resources we now use were added to the game.
While this is not anything that will revolutionize the game, it is a great and interesting direction for a Custodian content designer to explore, which we are still establishing on the team. I do hope you enjoy your (slightly) more exciting and varied early game!
Terraforming Events and AI behavioral changes
Yes, hello, I am still here. My other task for this patch was to create a few varied random events for terraforming. These events vary in power and complexity and mainly break the monotony of pressing a button and getting a better planet. These bonuses vary from getting more districts of a chosen type to perhaps uncovering a dig site left by a species to enamoured with war.
Before you start thinking, you will sit there and terraform a planet back and forth between two different types and fishing for events. Do know that you can only get events the first time you terraform a world, and it’s never guaranteed. Terraforming is quite the unexplored space for Stellaris events, and these were a lot of fun to create.
Finally, Caligula Caesar has managed to restore the AI’s terraforming hunger! Previously the AI needed to gather an absurd amount of energy credits even to consider terraforming, but that has now been rectified. The AI has been spotted changing and creating optimal planets in our internal testing. They also are more likely to pick terraforming techs and appropriate ascension perks in certain circumstances.
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That is all for this week folks! Next week we’ll be back with some exciting news!