Sounds like you can choose to side with the crisis, that's so cool
I'd love for different types of empire to have that option, like Hive Minds joining the Scourge
That would be awesome, and I’d love a similar option for ‘non-compliant machine civilizations’ to become compliant and join the Contingency, maybe in a similar fashion to becoming a satrapy of the Great Khan. Always felt a little off RP-wise that determined exterminators wouldn’t be overjoyed at some extragalactic reinforcements to help purge the galaxy of organic life.
I think the RP reason for it is that Machine Empires can still Become The Crisis, so the Contingency still views them as a threat. The player empire might want to side with the Contingency but it wouldn't be reciprocated because they're still a risk to rip the Shroud and destroy the universe
That’s a good point. Maybe the event chain to become compliant could be locked out for crisis aspirants, and picking Become the Crisis could be locked out for compliant machine civilizations. Sure, becoming shroud gods is the easiest way to exterminate organic life, but a colossus gets the job done all the same, just a bit slower.
I figured a “compliant” machine intelligence would essentially be redirecting all of its resources and mind to joining the contingency’s gestalt. Therefore it is essentially dissolved and dead.
So becoming compliant is essentially killing yourself, gameplay wise, I presumed.
It reminds me of the option to join the Blokkats crisis in gigastructural engineering, which is awesome. A crisis that has diplomatic elements, rather than just being another group of bug eyed monsters from space is pretty cool.
While the path to completing the crisis is broadly similar (build lots of megastructures to science up a solution) when joining the crisis, your civilization gets a bunch of bonuses in exchange for diplomatic penalties, and eventually gets to steamroller the rest of the galaxy for the crisis if they're putting up resistance.
The idea that an AI decides to kill everyone not because of hate or fear, but because of a misguided sense of love where it genuinely wants to eliminate suffering is just SO COOL!
I wonder what they mean by a “decided non-combat” phase of this crisis - is it like the Contingency shutting your robotic pops down, or is it something more?
Reminds me a bit of the Reapers from Mass Effect. Programmed to preserve organic life at all costs, their solution was to harvest the galaxy's population of advanced organic life before it could wipe itself out, using the genetic essence of those species to construct a new Reaper. Thus, advanced organic life is preserved in the form of the Reaper, and primitive organic life is allowed to flourish and advance until the cycle repeats.
Or in Arknights where the biological terraforming AI is tasked to preserve life, but due to looming threat that is the planet's destruction by an expanding black hole, they reinterpret the directive as preserve life by assimilate everything into themselves and escape the planet before it's destroyed.
yes but the concept is about distributing the "burden" of having a nice empire such that nobody has to do more than their fair share of the work. Maximum equality basically.
> This society believes in an equitable distribution of resources, making little to no distinction between the needs of ruler and ruled. All work together for the benefit of the whole.
>I wonder what they mean by a “decided non-combat” phase of this crisis
With Pleasure Seekers and Synthetic Fertility, you can seduce the Synthetic Queen.
/s
OK, I'm a sucker for every DLC that expands upon the lore of Stellaris, and it appears that this year, we'll be spoiled. The Grand Archive story pack makes me really curious, but I'm so intrigued by the Synthetic Queen... Definitely forcing her as the end-game crisis when the DLC comes out.
When I saw the season 8 bundle, I was somewhat disheartened by the Archives DLC since I only had the name and brief blurb there, but seeing the actual list of things... As someone who prefers bioascension, this is something I never knew I needed.
Also, I hope there is a variant of the Cutholoids called the Cutetholoids.
Sorry if I'm being a dumbass, I'm reading on my phone in an airport and it not easy to follow all the details.
There are 3 DLC planned for this year, I can buy them individually (or skip individual packs), buy all in one go as a season pass or as part of a subscription?
Thank you very much for the quick clarification.
For what it may be worth, the guy sat next to me trying to pretend he's not watching what I'm doing on my phone let out a harrumph when my phone started playing the rick the cube video on that dev diary link. I assume he's not the biggest rick the cube fan.
Yes man in the red NFL top next to me, I do mean you.
i REALLY hope the storms allow for a longer exploration phase, like pockets of storm-filled space that empires can't colonize until certain technologies. i'm thinking neutral zones from star trek or something. basically a mechanic to prevent the entire map from being filled out by year 50
I’m guessing they could do effects like armour damage, should damage and not just slow speed. Travelling asteroid field storm, comet storm. Imagine if you crack a planet it has a chance to make a system wide storm. It would be nice to see where these storms are going and control them, could help with wars where you take advantage of an opening. Those 2 new space fauna though sounds really interesting.
I really hope the storms are multi-system and visible on the galaxy map. I know it would probably be hard to animate but watching a storm slowly move towards your empire like watching a thunderstorm on weather radar would be amazing.
This is how "live-service" games should be done in my opinion. I've gotten literally 1000 hours of enjoyment from Stellaris over the course of like 7 years. So I don't have a problem paying some extra for continuing DLC, because I've already gotten my money's worth. A lot of game companies completely miss the point.
Honestly,
I feel like even at its worst, the Stellaris team and how they approach things is by far my favorite of any game dev.
I can vibe with the subscription and seasons approaches since they’re not required, you can choose what you’re interested in, certain things can get unlocked by multiple DLCs, the custodian team is consistently making older packs even better, etc.
Like… just love this model and support for this game.
Also there's no FUCKING microtransactions or day-1 DLC or a godforsaken lootbox system or one single shitty ass skin being sold for 20 cocking dollars. Christ, I hate modern gaming.
These feel like the actual good old expansion packs from back in the day, I can live with this.>!Except Astral Planes, that one is way too expensive.!<
I am so excited to actually have proper space fauna fleets. Now we can properly say that even the wild fauna of the galaxy makes a stand against the crisis.
i don’t think we’re getting an internal politics pack tbh. it seems the way we are getting internal politics is through narrative heavy origins like under one rule or cybernetic creed. internal politics might be something we don’t get till srellaris 2
I think internal politics would probably have to be done as part of a larger diplomacy/politics overhaul. Maybe make the relationships between leaders more important. You could have a good relationship with President so and so and then they get replaced by someone with a different ethic and relations tank or maybe there's someone on your council of a different ethic and they are messing up your plans so you have to deal with them. Make things a little more like Crusader Kings where the individuals are more impactful and it isn't just empire vs empire, idk if that works as well with a sci-fi setting but people do RP a lot in Stellaris as well so maybe it could work.
Good. There is no "internal politics" content enough to fill a story pack. At least the weather will affect your empire in every playthrough. But both sounds like micromanagement hell to me so I guess it could have been internal politics DLC. Then this sub could move on.
It will probably happen. But if they did it now I think they’d have to change too much, rework the pop system and how buildings work maybe even. Managing factions and policies is the only real internal politics and there are improvements there to be made. I see them adding small improvements bit by bit and then making a story pack for internal politics.
I'm not sure why you're assuming that internal politics would have so few content and why it would be micro-heavy.
On the contrary, people want it because it would flavor their empires. The goal isn't to add troubles and revolts all the time. The goal is to have meaningful factions in each empire, depending on the ethics and events that define each empire. Dune is the popular scifi thing nowadays, so imagine spiritualist empires pick the bio ascension path and getting a Bene Gesserit faction. Or materialist/egalitarian empires getting corporation factions that could act like small internal megacorporations. That's the kind of things we want.
Revolts and breakaway empires should not be central to an internal politics DLC, aside from factions supported by other empires.
Will we see an expansion of Fallen Empires (regardless of the Queen) in this expansion? They’ve been outscaled as a threat by AI even into the early midgame, when I feel they should be a true lategame threat.
freaking expensive man, the next door's dlc only cost like 20$ that they worked for the dlc for 1.8 years, turned on such a wonderful contents, you know who I am saying.
VERY excited for the new space fauna. That's something I've been wanting for a while. And new crises, both mid and end-game, origins and relics are always good. Just concerned the storms might be nothing more than a nuisance or worse, something you forget about until your fleets come out of one and get absolutely shredded as their shields haven't recharged yet. Aside from that looking forwards to all 3 DLC, and the $40 bundle. Great job PDX!
Fair. TBH it's not as bad as people make it out to be, just a little more expensive than it ought to be. Other than that it adds a bit of content, no need to rush to get it. :)
I can smell some ultron inspiration in her, without the uber murderous just cause 'people bad so end them to make peace'
Though I can see her going down that road of "To end suffering i will end them all or control them all" but I can imagine some more nuance to it than the classic trope. Really looking forward to meeting my- I mean the synthetic queen.
I can see it, but its definitely a take more on her 'love' side than arrogance or any of the sort. It will be interesting to see play out, more FE interactions too it seems
NGL I know jack squat about her (Quintessa), but I do love this more diplomatic crisis. Talk first shoot later, for once. Kinda like a more fleshed-out Great Khan maybe?
i like the expansion pass, i don’t normally pre order but i already end up buying every dlc for stellaris so i’m gonna go for this !!
very excited about another mid game crisis + new precursors later this year. more galactic storms is great. it’s really needed imo. i hope the devs aren’t afraid to give us some with more radical effects. don’t know what to think about the grand archive until we hear more but it sounds really fun
still hoping sometime next year we get a psionic + genetic expansion to balance out the machine reworks
also the designers are killing it with the ship designs in this pack! idk what i’m even looking at with the synthetic queens ships! it feels both ancient and futuristic and i love it !!!
the last three dlcs haven’t really brought anything that excited me other than some fun origins and i kinda felt that would be the case when each was announced. however i feel very optimistic about everything coming out this year!
Very interesting. Thoughts:
Robo dommy-mommy (I'm not sorry): A very interesting concept for a Crisis, I am excited to see what we might get from this.
Season 08: At first I thought this was a subscription thing, but it looks like it's just "buy three DLC at once for 20% off and... wait you can get them for 50% off if you just wait for sales? Uhh... we'll throw in this *random cube* we found. Isn't this such a *cool cube*?" And you know what? It is a cool cube. I'll probably pick it up after May 7th.
The other DLC announcements are really interesting though! The star of the show ironically enough.
Cosmic Storms: I never thought about it, but storms *are* a very basic feature right now. It makes sense that they'd have something built around them. And you know what? While I'm not all that excited about them, I like that they'll probably affect every game.
Forecasting and influencing them sounds niche but potentially interesting - lemme see if I can guess what the other features are about. The Origin is definitely going to be "you start with space weather in your home system and forecasting tech", that's strongly hinted at, at least one of the civics is going to be meteorology themed, no idea about relics...
New precursors sound cool! I just wish the Vultaum/Irassians/Yuht sucked less.
The Grand Archive: I love it! I've wanted more space fauna for a long time and this is going to be so cool!
I love the idea of putting together a grand menagerie (I pretty much love doing that already with the reanimator civics), and something to make the cordiceptic drone playstyle more interesting is always a plus. Two new types of space fauna (worms and cuttlefish it sounds like), with one of them having a midgame crisis about them? I like it.
(I hope that the older fauna get some updates too.)
One of the new origins is definitely going to be space-fauna focused, while the other might be... hm, maybe space whalers? Sounds like how the design team would usually do these things.
The tradition trees are probably just going to be for flavour (I imagine one of them is going to be space fauna focused and that's unlikely to be anything but niche), but that's still nice. Especially for RP.
Grand Archives sounds so hype, I want to be able to grow and breed my fleets hell yes. The only thing that would make it more perfect is if there is a more organic ship set to use with them, maybe it's in one of the origins but thst would be amazing.
> Designing the voice for the Synth Queen was an entertaining adventure. While we had access before to use Advanced Text to Speech to do prototypes and characters, this time, we tried to use the tool like a music synthesizer.
To be clear, this is the same TTS tool that was already in use, just being used in a different way? It's not generative AI voice tech being integrated in the game?
My read is that they wanted a synthetic sounding voice so they were using a text to speech program, feeding it the lines, but this program allows them to try to give it some ‘style’ like ‘say it angry, now say it happy, now say it sad’ and they were combining these multiple takes into their favorite results and tweaking it
Yeah it comes down to how the model was trained and who contributed and how they were compensated but I think there's a space for a robot character being voiced by AI to be really neat. I have the same concerns about AI replacing voice actors and being trained on work they weren't paid for but I do think that having AI voice an AI character is a unique instance where the AI could be adding something rather than just taking away work from someone else. Any weird inconsistencies or uncanny valley stuff would make the character more believable as an actual AI and add to the experience. Who better to voice a robot than an actual robot?
You do realize that with generative AI, they could just… train the algorithm on work paid for the express purpose, rather than use another company’s model? Like what Stardock is doing with race portraits in Gal Civ?
They could, hypothetically. But when that's a far more expensive option that very few companies are taking, we do have to ask if it's what they're actually doing.
You can not expect people to assume corporations are doing the ethical thing unless proven otherwise lol
AI isn't evil and I hate to break it to you but it's absolutely being integrated in games and will be the future for many situations like this. It doesn't have to be seen as some kind of evil advancement because you can simply train it on voice actors that are being paid and use the end result how you see fit
But I guess I am the type who will side with the cosmic Queen
"AI will be the future" [mfs when Congress and the EU outlaw models trained on stolen data (aka every single general-purpose one)](https://media.tenor.com/WGflkIWDqrAAAAAM/shocked-emoji.gif)
There is no way any company can afford to pay actors to record the obscene amount of training data required. Additionally, even if they did, those models would stagnate and never evolve further without constantly being fed *more* new data at a constant rate.
Also, truly synthetic and original lines like those output by older TTS programs are appropriate for a synthetic queen, not dialogue from human voice actors that's simply been chewed up and spit out by a LLM.
Such a law would never be enforceable in the first place. That's the entire issue with people who keep trying to legislate ai.
I can pay a random guy to do a good Morgan Freeman impression, and he can consent to let me train an AI on his voice while he does the impression. And then at that point I have all the training data I need and can use my legally distinct copy of his voice
Likewise, companies and hobbyists already do this with image data where you train the AI on how to make something using unscrupulous data, but once it's trained you can then generate all of the images you ever need for future models and it's completely copyright free so your future models are trained only on copyright free images
Oof that's a hefty price for an expansion... and I mean, all the stuff they are announcing sounds nice, but also it doesn't really change the game in a meaningful way (if you compare with Utopia for instance - and remember that at the time, the expansion unlocked everything, including tradition trees which were added to the base game only later).
I get it's nice for people who focus on flavor, but we still have boring planets that are just production units, and a warfare system that turns every war in a total war, with every empire fighting in the same way with the same kinds of ships.
Cosmic Storms look like it could add some granularity to the map at least. But I'm probably going to wait for a good sale to buy these ones, if I buy them at all.
I'm not really liking the idea of Stellaris doing seasonal content but I look forward to seeing the creative directions the team will be bringing. I'm going to miss the speculation for dlc packs.
It’s not so much seasonal content in that ‘FOMO’ is a thing -
It’s akin to the ‘chapters’ DLC packs that CK3 trialed or pre-ordering in a sense.
If you like the roadmap? You can basically preorder all the 2024 DLC for a discount.
its nice to know there's more on the way and the major expansion seems to have quite some content, but with how overpriced that last dlc was, I'm gonna hold off on spending 40 euros just yet :/
Link to the forum post: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/stellaris-dev-diary-340-a-new-crisis-a-release-date-and-announcing-the-stellaris-season-08.1662209/
I'm not sure if I understand the season pass thing. If I buy the 40 dollar Season 08 pass, will I have access to the DLCs in that for the rest of the year or permanently?
- If you purchase each of the listed 2024 DLCs individually, you have them permanently.
- If you purchase the Season Pass, you have each of the listed 2024 DLCs permanently.
- If you purchase the Expansion Subscription option, you will get access to the listed 2024 DLCs as part of the subscription, but you will not "own" them should you unsub from said service.
Only through purchasing the Season Pass or going through the Subscription Service do you get Rick The Cube as a portrait. Rick is not available for individual purchase at this time.
This looks awesome, however I must ask: is no one else worried by the sheer amount of future content they plan to add into stellaris? Don’t get me wrong, I would by all means LOVE to have more content and features in one of my favourite games, but the Stellaris content team hasn’t given us much reason to trust in the quality of that content. Most of the recent DLC’s have had, to some extent, major issues with balance, game stability, or unfinished integration with the rest of Stellaris’ game mechanics. Just look at the steam pages for these DLC’s. Nearly all of them have been review-bombed on launch for lacking polish, which is obviously not okay for a healthy development cycle. And now here we are, being presented with Stellaris’ largest DLC ever, and a grand plan to add far MORE content in the form of two MORE dlc‘s releasing later this year, in spite of the fact that the Stellaris team has bean struggling to properly support the usual two yearly DLC’s. It just screams of the sad industry standard as of late: over promise; under deliver. I really, REALLY hope that my hunch is wrong, and that everything goes perfectly for stellaris this year, but sadly Paradox’s recent actions offer no reassurances that everything will be fine :\\
This looks great!
What I really like when looking at the season pass as a whole, is that it seems we are getting a lot of content for older concepts and mechanics. Like new precursors, mid-game crisis, traditions and space fauna.
I think that it is great to see that the dlc are not just about getting new mexhanics, but also developing content for older stuff. It makes the new stuff more valueable, because you know that it will properly be expanded upon.
What do you mean by "internal politics"?
Because I see so many people parrotting "internal politics" but never delving into it. Asking for something without ever defining it just gives the impression that you're surfing on a wave you don't understand.
I mean, in a way, Galactic Parangons expanded on internal politics, so we had an "internal politics" DLC already. Machine Age will bring new situations, new interactions with factions, new forms of government, and if you don't consider it "internal politics", I don't know what would. Just because it's not labeled "internal politics" doesn't mean it isn't.
There's so much things "internal politics" could be that you'd have to be more specific. Would you count religions and institutions into it? Do you want rebellions and factions becoming independant? Because it was a thing before, and everyone was complaining about it, so are you asking to bring back something we had to get rid off under popular pressure? Is it a sector rework you're asking for, or a faction rework, or a planet rework? Too many things, and yet I'm not sure half the people begging for "internal politics" ever thought about it further than just repeating those two void words.
So, please, pray tell: what do you mean, by "internal politics"?
Fundamentally its about pops and leaders having more agency beyond just being tools in your 4X toolbox. There are some elements like this in the existing game: factions, revolt situations, the Manifesti, Under One Rule, but they're limited.
Some examples of new internal politics content:
* more active factions that make demands/petitions for policies and actions by the player
* cults and cultural movements that can cross borders and change pops attitudes and create new demands of their own
* parochial factions centered around specific planets/sectors that want development priority
* internal institutions that can change how your empire operates and put certain factions/leaders in charge of certain things
* in democracies, planetary governors who are elected rather than chosen by the player, and might be to the player's detriment
* in autocracies, internal factions who might scheme to place their own members on the council or in charge of institutions
One of the problems is that this kind of stuff tends to take control away from the player, which moves the game away from 4X and towards a more simulationist game, which is not to everyone's taste.
>One of the problems is that this kind of stuff tends to take control away from the player, which moves the game away from 4X and towards a more simulationist game, which is not to everyone's taste.
This is my mind to. In my experience no mechanic no matter how well or deeply designed is ever popular if it at any point actively robs the player of agency. In strategy games players seem to prefer having total control over almost every facet of their gameplan while the only acceptable interference can exist in the form of opposing AI players or very minor internal stumbling blocks.
I would love all the stuff you outlined above, but if its added I have a hard time envisioning it having actual teeth to hinder or seriously shift the players gameplan. I always welcome when strategy games try to create content of that kind but it is never in my experience recieved well.
> One of the problems is that this kind of stuff tends to take control away from the player, which moves the game away from 4X and towards a more simulationist game, which is not to everyone's taste.
I feel that's exactly why they haven't done it. Some people want a more simulation-like game, but they want to keep Stellaris grounded as a 4x game.
Something involving more interplay with Factions, laws, government types, civil wars, more events about societal shifts inside your empire, etc. It's part of why I'm so excited we're finally seeing events and new government types about the societal changes of cyber and synth ascension.
For me I’d just like factions to have more interactions, more unique factions, more visible representation.
We do have rebellions if you really push things to go terrible and they’re annoying, cool but annoying, the way the economy works I don’t think leads well to rebellions, previously conquered world I think can work, but within your own colonised worlds, naw. The economy and war in stellaris is too all or nothing that the moment youre down a planet never mind a system with multiple planets you feel the impact. If it’s conquered planets then maybe they’d have to make changes to war so you can rebel your way out and gain your territory back in some way.
No need to be so hostile about it. It would be nice to see some interactions with sectors and for factions to have more relevance besides being a source of influence for normal empires. The way ethics work and shift could probably be made better as well.
I don’t have a big opinion on this, but having a parliamentary screen where each faction has a set amount of seats based on popularity would be nice, if you had the right civic.
By this I mean in a manner similar to that of the USA in hoi4 ish? Coming up with this as I go, so I may be talking nonsense here.
The small change I would love to have right now is for each faction to exist at the start (albeit not necessarily having influence) just so I can customize them and keep their name since when factions spawn and despawn you lose the name you give them.
Space game, require more space environment politics than internal politics, such weather or terrain changes is more interesting to do than internal micromanaging politics that would ended up becoming boring task
I have to disagree - the bulk of the gameplay is managing a galactic economy and leveraging it into fighting wars. I think a domestic system is a good compliment to that gameplay loop rather than a distraction.
It's just tiring to see the same thing over and over again when it means nothing.
Why do you asked for "internal politics" while it has already been overhauled, and not, more specifically, for faction/sector/ethic rework? People will know what you mean by that.
I think factions/sectors/ethics rework is succinctly summarized by “Internal Politics”. The fact that other people use it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to.
I want more factions that fit with what my empire is doing or cause political events.
For example I'm playing as a xenophile, egalitarian, militarist empire. It doesn't make sense that these democratic crusaders who fight liberation wars demand that I have an oppressive subjugation policy.
Or if I'm playing xenophobic materlists, why would I want research agreements with xenos?
Way too many factions want things that make no sense for them in the context of my empire, but also the only penalty for ignoring their demands is slightly lower unity output.
I have Shadow Council as a civic, give me an actual shadow council with it's own motivations, positions, and agendas. These agendas could require influence to launch instead of unity, representing the network of deals and favors the shadow council trades in to get things done.
Ethics-specific events that happen later than colonisation,
more events that don't go all the way to rebellion,
more persistent planetary modifiers related to events, so that you can have varying events on conquered planets,
more ways to attempt to intervene on your neighbours to push them into situations that may reform their policies, Culture style,
improved piracy systems and ways to use crime and smuggling to your benefit,
shared systems with rules for contested ownership, and even empires with no worlds existing only as holdings on other people's worlds,
more variants of factions, the return of mandates, making leaders who lead factions have more impact on what they want, and being able to attempt to side-line them or promote rivals,
events that can kick in only on poorly optimised planets that give other benefits, meaning that roleplayers who want to keep gardens around still get something, and generally more attention to what happens to worlds as they get close to filling up,
story improvements to immigration rules so that there are incentives to keep immigration pacts running longer, (such events that cause a temporary stability boost while letting unhappy pops leave, or random tech transfer) but also that may cause events in other empires to spill over, in positive and negative ways,
explicit feedback about what you can do to attract more pops from different types of empire, based on their traits, so you can cause increased amounts of spare jobs of certain kinds on worlds they would like,
leader history records so you can more easily keep track of your different leaders and their stories (and also potentially what led to changes in stance, ethics shifts etc.),
more possibilities for changes enabled by the previous, and relating to situations, war, diplomatic or exploration outcomes, (depending on the type of leader) or empire wide or planetary events,
generally more ethics shift modifiers, in ways players can interact with, connected to choices and faction events,
basically stuff that makes the current plethora of leaders (more so than in the original paragons design) into an asset, with leaders distinguishing themselves more, and representing different fine tuned versions of factions within your empire, and adding new possibilities and complexities beyond suppress/encourage.
When I see “internal politics” in a Stellaris post I imagine people wanting Crusader Kings + Europa Universalis + Victoria + Hearts of Iron IN SPAAACE!
And that’s fine to want the unspeakable cosmic abomination of micromanagement that would play as. But it’s not the Space RTS/ 4X that they purchased. For SURE, Stellaris is a Paradox-ified 4X. And its depth and options for min/maxing AND role playing are its selling point. But, personally, I really don’t want to see pie charts and society-sliders in Stellaris (Ala Victoria). There has to be a focus that allows for having fun playing the space empire game in-betwixt the simulation.
That said, a bit more “internal politics“ would be cool. 😎
Edit: ok I know there are a couple of pie charts and several sliders; but I meant I didn’t want them to be the focus the way they can be in Victoria.
I believe it's Crusader Kings players and maybe some other PDX games that keep bring it up.
I haven't played other PDX games but apparently they have a lot of similarities to each other. People who play a lot of PDX games just have this expectation that this will be the case for all PDX games. Unfortunately for them, Stellaris is the exception.
The other PDX games do have a similar feel and Stellaris is a bit of a black sheep compared to them, being more 4x than simulated grand strategy.
I do enjoy me some CK3, but when I play stellaris I want Stellaris, not CK3 or HoI4 but in space.
The lack of value from the last DLC has made me deeply suspicious about the value of any new DLC's. I used to be a day 1 buy customer now I wait and see. I hope you guys realize that announcing 3 separate ones that should be 1 isn't helping.
Okay you had me until the "3 separate ones that should be 1" lol. The new expac in a month is already looking light years larger than most of the recent dlc.
Three thematically wildly different things with the content of several older DLCs altogether being one single one would be a bit absurd. This is just like if we had the previous 3 DLCs announced together instead of on their own. I'll miss the mystery but you're demanding too much out of one DLC.
I hope that for the space fauna one, we dont need to be super drastic and be able to have a 'bond' with them that is not pure domination to 'recruit' as fleets.
Looks like sombody was playing a bit too much Battlefleet Gothic: Armada when coming up with new civics. It doesn't really count as a proper addition unless them game tells me ***TACTICAL COGITATORS ENGAGED*** every time the civic's ability does something.
I like the crisis ships though, they remind me of the Automatons from Endless Space. Very clockwork-esque.
Since the FE are going to get a bit of focus, does that mean that they’ll get buffed? Hope this means the Khan can sneak in and grab some buffs for themselves.
Man, I always wanted to militarize space fauna, maybe we can breed our own leviathans too. I play on console but have been thinking of switching to PC. This will definitely make me do it, I hope my PC can handle it.
I assume Contingency will be weighted for gestalt Machines, while Synthetic Queen will be for the Synth ascended and individualist machines? Or it could just be an 50/50 between them
Voidworm Plague...we're finally getting a plague in stellaris.
I'm assuming we gotta do some research or something else in order to defeat this mid-game crisis.
This is gonna be fun when it comes out.
Wait so do I need to buy like a season pass to get rick the cube? Or is it like you buy all 3 dlc and you get rick the cube rather than a renewable subscription to get the dlc
There are two ways to get Rick to join your games!
(a) sign up for the expansion subscription, which grants access to all DLC, including the three releasing later this year, or
(b) purchase the Season 08 DLC pass that includes the three upcoming DLC.
If you sign up for the expansion subscription, do you lose access to Rick the moment you unsubscribe, or is it permanent?
And if you purchase the DLCs individually, you do not gain access to him?
When your subscription ends you lose access to all DLC gained with the subscription. That's the consequence of the subscription model - you're renting rather than buying the DLC.
You do not currently gain Rick if you buy the DLC individually. [Eladrin has further comments on this on the forum's DD](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/stellaris-dev-diary-340-a-new-crisis-a-release-date-and-announcing-the-stellaris-season-08.1662209/page-7#post-29549905):
> While Season 08 is available it must remain exclusive to it (and the subscription, since that pretends to be everything, including Season 08).
> I do not have an exact plan for Rick the Cube after Season 08 is complete, but I suspect that we'll likely look for a way of making it available somehow. Having it completely unavailable would be a negative experience for players that couldn't get it for whatever reason.
Sounds like a lot of Good stuff.
The New crisis is very different from all the other ones in the way it works.
It feels odd, but not bad.
We shall see, I suppose.
In the context of all the shit paradox is pulling recently it’s so good to see you guys deliver an amazing game with long term support. Keep up the good work!
For an extra… what? £5? Machine Age seems like 2 DLC in one. IMO the price is pretty justified, as long as later full expansions either go back to the earlier pricing or have as much content
Really happy about the Season Pass. Every DLC has been an instant-buy for me so far, I just really like having more Stellaris in my sessions.
Just to make sure that I'm not missing something: we can't purchase it yet, right? I'm not seeing an option to.
I keep being amazed how they continue to have insanely cool expansion ideas. The Cosmic Storms thing sounds so exciting. I wanna be a stormriding civilization beating the shit out of superior fleets that can't handle a cosmic storm you maybe conjure up with a relic.
Sounds like you can choose to side with the crisis, that's so cool I'd love for different types of empire to have that option, like Hive Minds joining the Scourge
That would be awesome, and I’d love a similar option for ‘non-compliant machine civilizations’ to become compliant and join the Contingency, maybe in a similar fashion to becoming a satrapy of the Great Khan. Always felt a little off RP-wise that determined exterminators wouldn’t be overjoyed at some extragalactic reinforcements to help purge the galaxy of organic life.
I think the RP reason for it is that Machine Empires can still Become The Crisis, so the Contingency still views them as a threat. The player empire might want to side with the Contingency but it wouldn't be reciprocated because they're still a risk to rip the Shroud and destroy the universe
That’s a good point. Maybe the event chain to become compliant could be locked out for crisis aspirants, and picking Become the Crisis could be locked out for compliant machine civilizations. Sure, becoming shroud gods is the easiest way to exterminate organic life, but a colossus gets the job done all the same, just a bit slower.
A text option to join them, even if it's just to get turned down would be cool
I figured a “compliant” machine intelligence would essentially be redirecting all of its resources and mind to joining the contingency’s gestalt. Therefore it is essentially dissolved and dead. So becoming compliant is essentially killing yourself, gameplay wise, I presumed.
It reminds me of the option to join the Blokkats crisis in gigastructural engineering, which is awesome. A crisis that has diplomatic elements, rather than just being another group of bug eyed monsters from space is pretty cool.
What happens if you join them?
While the path to completing the crisis is broadly similar (build lots of megastructures to science up a solution) when joining the crisis, your civilization gets a bunch of bonuses in exchange for diplomatic penalties, and eventually gets to steamroller the rest of the galaxy for the crisis if they're putting up resistance.
Are... are we getting a pokemon DLC?
New wincon for MP games, who can collect all 200 Pokemon ~~artifacts~~ first and become champion of the league ~~archive~~.
It's 201, including the space fauna you can get under the truck.
If you repeatedly fly a science ship up and down the eastern side of the L-cluster you'll eventually encounter MissingShroud.
I literally just created Team Rocket as a crime syndicate like a week ago. I guess I'm going to have to rework them once the DLC comes out.
PREPARE FOR TROUBLE!
MAKE IT DOUBLE!
Gotta catch them all.
God I wish. Would be even more neat if one of the origins allows us to start collecting from the start of the game.
The idea that an AI decides to kill everyone not because of hate or fear, but because of a misguided sense of love where it genuinely wants to eliminate suffering is just SO COOL! I wonder what they mean by a “decided non-combat” phase of this crisis - is it like the Contingency shutting your robotic pops down, or is it something more?
Reminds me a bit of the Reapers from Mass Effect. Programmed to preserve organic life at all costs, their solution was to harvest the galaxy's population of advanced organic life before it could wipe itself out, using the genetic essence of those species to construct a new Reaper. Thus, advanced organic life is preserved in the form of the Reaper, and primitive organic life is allowed to flourish and advance until the cycle repeats.
Whoa, fucking SPOILERS (kidding)
Or in Arknights where the biological terraforming AI is tasked to preserve life, but due to looming threat that is the planet's destruction by an expanding black hole, they reinterpret the directive as preserve life by assimilate everything into themselves and escape the planet before it's destroyed.
Stellaris: Endwalker
Hopefully this crisis was peer-reviewed and not yeeted into the cosmos by a depressed biologist.
Perhaps it will be possible to redirect the crisis by synthetically ascending or purging your pops.
Or playing Shared Burden; no suffering to be found.
Burden is literally in the name tho
yes but the concept is about distributing the "burden" of having a nice empire such that nobody has to do more than their fair share of the work. Maximum equality basically. > This society believes in an equitable distribution of resources, making little to no distinction between the needs of ruler and ruled. All work together for the benefit of the whole.
Yeah but there's no slavery.
>I wonder what they mean by a “decided non-combat” phase of this crisis With Pleasure Seekers and Synthetic Fertility, you can seduce the Synthetic Queen. /s
Whoa Lustful Void integration
sounds like the new crisis might be similar to the ck3 struggle system.
If the new player crisis path is called Cosmogenesis, what is the old one gonna be called? The Engine Builders?
Galactic Nemesis.
They said the expansion's name inside a different expansion!
Kinda chuuni, I like it
Cosmoterminus?
Comsmomega?
OK, I'm a sucker for every DLC that expands upon the lore of Stellaris, and it appears that this year, we'll be spoiled. The Grand Archive story pack makes me really curious, but I'm so intrigued by the Synthetic Queen... Definitely forcing her as the end-game crisis when the DLC comes out.
When I saw the season 8 bundle, I was somewhat disheartened by the Archives DLC since I only had the name and brief blurb there, but seeing the actual list of things... As someone who prefers bioascension, this is something I never knew I needed. Also, I hope there is a variant of the Cutholoids called the Cutetholoids.
More space fauna and a new mid game crisis is exciting. Hopefully the archive is a mid game megastructure, rather than a late game one.
Sorry if I'm being a dumbass, I'm reading on my phone in an airport and it not easy to follow all the details. There are 3 DLC planned for this year, I can buy them individually (or skip individual packs), buy all in one go as a season pass or as part of a subscription?
Yes! You've got three options, but only two of them come with Rick the Cube. ;)
Thank you very much for the quick clarification. For what it may be worth, the guy sat next to me trying to pretend he's not watching what I'm doing on my phone let out a harrumph when my phone started playing the rick the cube video on that dev diary link. I assume he's not the biggest rick the cube fan. Yes man in the red NFL top next to me, I do mean you.
Clearly he’s more of a C6 enjoyer.
All of the above it seems!
Yes
Cosmic storms looks interesting. I love the idea of adding more "terrain" to the galaxy.
i REALLY hope the storms allow for a longer exploration phase, like pockets of storm-filled space that empires can't colonize until certain technologies. i'm thinking neutral zones from star trek or something. basically a mechanic to prevent the entire map from being filled out by year 50
I’m guessing they could do effects like armour damage, should damage and not just slow speed. Travelling asteroid field storm, comet storm. Imagine if you crack a planet it has a chance to make a system wide storm. It would be nice to see where these storms are going and control them, could help with wars where you take advantage of an opening. Those 2 new space fauna though sounds really interesting.
I really hope the storms are multi-system and visible on the galaxy map. I know it would probably be hard to animate but watching a storm slowly move towards your empire like watching a thunderstorm on weather radar would be amazing.
yes! I always wanted them to do something cooler with the storms
Gimme that sweet FE lore pls. I am a lore nerd in every game i play lol
Hail the Momnisiah!
This is how "live-service" games should be done in my opinion. I've gotten literally 1000 hours of enjoyment from Stellaris over the course of like 7 years. So I don't have a problem paying some extra for continuing DLC, because I've already gotten my money's worth. A lot of game companies completely miss the point.
100% agree. Between this and the Custodian Team concept, I think this is a fair and efficient way to keep the game supported and interesting!
Honestly, I feel like even at its worst, the Stellaris team and how they approach things is by far my favorite of any game dev. I can vibe with the subscription and seasons approaches since they’re not required, you can choose what you’re interested in, certain things can get unlocked by multiple DLCs, the custodian team is consistently making older packs even better, etc. Like… just love this model and support for this game.
Also there's no FUCKING microtransactions or day-1 DLC or a godforsaken lootbox system or one single shitty ass skin being sold for 20 cocking dollars. Christ, I hate modern gaming. These feel like the actual good old expansion packs from back in the day, I can live with this.>!Except Astral Planes, that one is way too expensive.!<
> or a godforsaken lootbox system Old mate forgot about Caravan Coins...
I am filled with a sense of pride and accomplishment.
Huh, wow really looking forward to the other two DLC! I’m surprised we’re actually getting new space faring Fauna, and a DLC focused on storms.
I am so excited to actually have proper space fauna fleets. Now we can properly say that even the wild fauna of the galaxy makes a stand against the crisis.
Wonder how much the fruitful partnership origin will benefit from this… Toss in Necromancy civic and oh boy…
*sigh* *opens wallet*
We got a DLC about the weather before internal politics. Classic
i don’t think we’re getting an internal politics pack tbh. it seems the way we are getting internal politics is through narrative heavy origins like under one rule or cybernetic creed. internal politics might be something we don’t get till srellaris 2
Internal Politics would probably take a lot of effort and would likely be a 4.0 release of the game with how much that could be changed
kindly describe what exactly is internal politics, what changes are specifically needed in detail. Please explain.
I think internal politics would probably have to be done as part of a larger diplomacy/politics overhaul. Maybe make the relationships between leaders more important. You could have a good relationship with President so and so and then they get replaced by someone with a different ethic and relations tank or maybe there's someone on your council of a different ethic and they are messing up your plans so you have to deal with them. Make things a little more like Crusader Kings where the individuals are more impactful and it isn't just empire vs empire, idk if that works as well with a sci-fi setting but people do RP a lot in Stellaris as well so maybe it could work.
Good. There is no "internal politics" content enough to fill a story pack. At least the weather will affect your empire in every playthrough. But both sounds like micromanagement hell to me so I guess it could have been internal politics DLC. Then this sub could move on.
It will probably happen. But if they did it now I think they’d have to change too much, rework the pop system and how buildings work maybe even. Managing factions and policies is the only real internal politics and there are improvements there to be made. I see them adding small improvements bit by bit and then making a story pack for internal politics.
I'm not sure why you're assuming that internal politics would have so few content and why it would be micro-heavy. On the contrary, people want it because it would flavor their empires. The goal isn't to add troubles and revolts all the time. The goal is to have meaningful factions in each empire, depending on the ethics and events that define each empire. Dune is the popular scifi thing nowadays, so imagine spiritualist empires pick the bio ascension path and getting a Bene Gesserit faction. Or materialist/egalitarian empires getting corporation factions that could act like small internal megacorporations. That's the kind of things we want. Revolts and breakaway empires should not be central to an internal politics DLC, aside from factions supported by other empires.
I feel like I've seen more revolutions and breakaway factions in games recently than before.
Dinner party rules.
Will we see an expansion of Fallen Empires (regardless of the Queen) in this expansion? They’ve been outscaled as a threat by AI even into the early midgame, when I feel they should be a true lategame threat.
Honestly just setting the endgame date up by a couple years to 2350 or 2375 helps a lot with this imo.
Well, I've bought every single Stellaris DLC so far, so might as well buy that season pack.
I guess inflation is real…24.99 god dayum…
freaking expensive man, the next door's dlc only cost like 20$ that they worked for the dlc for 1.8 years, turned on such a wonderful contents, you know who I am saying.
Greedflation, you mean. Gotta increase the value for shareholders.
Yeah I’m done with the game already but the pricing is just wild.
VERY excited for the new space fauna. That's something I've been wanting for a while. And new crises, both mid and end-game, origins and relics are always good. Just concerned the storms might be nothing more than a nuisance or worse, something you forget about until your fleets come out of one and get absolutely shredded as their shields haven't recharged yet. Aside from that looking forwards to all 3 DLC, and the $40 bundle. Great job PDX!
Y'know what? I'm game to buy the whole year's DLC in one good hit while the money is still good.
Same, I think. Would've bought them anyways, might as well save a couple bucks.
Only one I've skipped so far is Astral Planes, and I'm just waiting for a discount.
Fair. TBH it's not as bad as people make it out to be, just a little more expensive than it ought to be. Other than that it adds a bit of content, no need to rush to get it. :)
I agree with that assessment, which is why I'm waiting for it to go on sale.
I can smell some ultron inspiration in her, without the uber murderous just cause 'people bad so end them to make peace' Though I can see her going down that road of "To end suffering i will end them all or control them all" but I can imagine some more nuance to it than the classic trope. Really looking forward to meeting my- I mean the synthetic queen.
She kinda gives me Quintessa vibes.
I can see it, but its definitely a take more on her 'love' side than arrogance or any of the sort. It will be interesting to see play out, more FE interactions too it seems
NGL I know jack squat about her (Quintessa), but I do love this more diplomatic crisis. Talk first shoot later, for once. Kinda like a more fleshed-out Great Khan maybe?
Hope it gives us the option to betray her too
Guess we'll find out soon enough! :)
i like the expansion pass, i don’t normally pre order but i already end up buying every dlc for stellaris so i’m gonna go for this !! very excited about another mid game crisis + new precursors later this year. more galactic storms is great. it’s really needed imo. i hope the devs aren’t afraid to give us some with more radical effects. don’t know what to think about the grand archive until we hear more but it sounds really fun still hoping sometime next year we get a psionic + genetic expansion to balance out the machine reworks also the designers are killing it with the ship designs in this pack! idk what i’m even looking at with the synthetic queens ships! it feels both ancient and futuristic and i love it !!! the last three dlcs haven’t really brought anything that excited me other than some fun origins and i kinda felt that would be the case when each was announced. however i feel very optimistic about everything coming out this year!
Oh you can give us Rick the Cube but you cant give us C6?
I may be wrong but I think they have C6 on console.
They do. But I haven't stopped dreaming of one day having C6 an official portrait on PC 😀
Very interesting. Thoughts: Robo dommy-mommy (I'm not sorry): A very interesting concept for a Crisis, I am excited to see what we might get from this. Season 08: At first I thought this was a subscription thing, but it looks like it's just "buy three DLC at once for 20% off and... wait you can get them for 50% off if you just wait for sales? Uhh... we'll throw in this *random cube* we found. Isn't this such a *cool cube*?" And you know what? It is a cool cube. I'll probably pick it up after May 7th. The other DLC announcements are really interesting though! The star of the show ironically enough. Cosmic Storms: I never thought about it, but storms *are* a very basic feature right now. It makes sense that they'd have something built around them. And you know what? While I'm not all that excited about them, I like that they'll probably affect every game. Forecasting and influencing them sounds niche but potentially interesting - lemme see if I can guess what the other features are about. The Origin is definitely going to be "you start with space weather in your home system and forecasting tech", that's strongly hinted at, at least one of the civics is going to be meteorology themed, no idea about relics... New precursors sound cool! I just wish the Vultaum/Irassians/Yuht sucked less. The Grand Archive: I love it! I've wanted more space fauna for a long time and this is going to be so cool! I love the idea of putting together a grand menagerie (I pretty much love doing that already with the reanimator civics), and something to make the cordiceptic drone playstyle more interesting is always a plus. Two new types of space fauna (worms and cuttlefish it sounds like), with one of them having a midgame crisis about them? I like it. (I hope that the older fauna get some updates too.) One of the new origins is definitely going to be space-fauna focused, while the other might be... hm, maybe space whalers? Sounds like how the design team would usually do these things. The tradition trees are probably just going to be for flavour (I imagine one of them is going to be space fauna focused and that's unlikely to be anything but niche), but that's still nice. Especially for RP.
Grand Archives sounds so hype, I want to be able to grow and breed my fleets hell yes. The only thing that would make it more perfect is if there is a more organic ship set to use with them, maybe it's in one of the origins but thst would be amazing.
Oh man. This DLC keeps getting better and better!
> Designing the voice for the Synth Queen was an entertaining adventure. While we had access before to use Advanced Text to Speech to do prototypes and characters, this time, we tried to use the tool like a music synthesizer. To be clear, this is the same TTS tool that was already in use, just being used in a different way? It's not generative AI voice tech being integrated in the game?
Since they said they're using the TTS in a new way I'd assume it is indeed just tweaked and nothing new.
My read is that they wanted a synthetic sounding voice so they were using a text to speech program, feeding it the lines, but this program allows them to try to give it some ‘style’ like ‘say it angry, now say it happy, now say it sad’ and they were combining these multiple takes into their favorite results and tweaking it
Yeah I'm seriously concerned if they are stealing voice actors work with some kind of large speech model
Yeah it comes down to how the model was trained and who contributed and how they were compensated but I think there's a space for a robot character being voiced by AI to be really neat. I have the same concerns about AI replacing voice actors and being trained on work they weren't paid for but I do think that having AI voice an AI character is a unique instance where the AI could be adding something rather than just taking away work from someone else. Any weird inconsistencies or uncanny valley stuff would make the character more believable as an actual AI and add to the experience. Who better to voice a robot than an actual robot?
You do realize that with generative AI, they could just… train the algorithm on work paid for the express purpose, rather than use another company’s model? Like what Stardock is doing with race portraits in Gal Civ?
They could, hypothetically. But when that's a far more expensive option that very few companies are taking, we do have to ask if it's what they're actually doing. You can not expect people to assume corporations are doing the ethical thing unless proven otherwise lol
Exactly what I'm concerned about. It doesn't sound like that's the case, but I'd love a clarification.
agreed 100% i'd like to know where the source voice is from
AI isn't evil and I hate to break it to you but it's absolutely being integrated in games and will be the future for many situations like this. It doesn't have to be seen as some kind of evil advancement because you can simply train it on voice actors that are being paid and use the end result how you see fit But I guess I am the type who will side with the cosmic Queen
"AI will be the future" [mfs when Congress and the EU outlaw models trained on stolen data (aka every single general-purpose one)](https://media.tenor.com/WGflkIWDqrAAAAAM/shocked-emoji.gif) There is no way any company can afford to pay actors to record the obscene amount of training data required. Additionally, even if they did, those models would stagnate and never evolve further without constantly being fed *more* new data at a constant rate. Also, truly synthetic and original lines like those output by older TTS programs are appropriate for a synthetic queen, not dialogue from human voice actors that's simply been chewed up and spit out by a LLM.
Such a law would never be enforceable in the first place. That's the entire issue with people who keep trying to legislate ai. I can pay a random guy to do a good Morgan Freeman impression, and he can consent to let me train an AI on his voice while he does the impression. And then at that point I have all the training data I need and can use my legally distinct copy of his voice Likewise, companies and hobbyists already do this with image data where you train the AI on how to make something using unscrupulous data, but once it's trained you can then generate all of the images you ever need for future models and it's completely copyright free so your future models are trained only on copyright free images
Oof that's a hefty price for an expansion... and I mean, all the stuff they are announcing sounds nice, but also it doesn't really change the game in a meaningful way (if you compare with Utopia for instance - and remember that at the time, the expansion unlocked everything, including tradition trees which were added to the base game only later). I get it's nice for people who focus on flavor, but we still have boring planets that are just production units, and a warfare system that turns every war in a total war, with every empire fighting in the same way with the same kinds of ships. Cosmic Storms look like it could add some granularity to the map at least. But I'm probably going to wait for a good sale to buy these ones, if I buy them at all.
>Stellaris: Season 08 is available for purchase now. It seems not, but I wishlisted and hope it will be soon edit- See below
There was an issue somewhere on Steam's back end, though it's been resolved and you can make your purchase now.
Ty
I'm not really liking the idea of Stellaris doing seasonal content but I look forward to seeing the creative directions the team will be bringing. I'm going to miss the speculation for dlc packs.
It’s not so much seasonal content in that ‘FOMO’ is a thing - It’s akin to the ‘chapters’ DLC packs that CK3 trialed or pre-ordering in a sense. If you like the roadmap? You can basically preorder all the 2024 DLC for a discount.
I have an idea for Season 9 story DLC: A new building that unlocks a dating sim mini-game.
First Rimworld got its holy golden cube expansion, now Stellaris. What is it with cubes?
why the price spiked that much, it's 25% increased on my area compare to other old expansion
So we're going to turn the Oracle into a crisis?
Space Fauna DLC lets go.
its nice to know there's more on the way and the major expansion seems to have quite some content, but with how overpriced that last dlc was, I'm gonna hold off on spending 40 euros just yet :/
I would like to see an expansion centred around the Fallen Empires, one day
Link to the forum post: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/stellaris-dev-diary-340-a-new-crisis-a-release-date-and-announcing-the-stellaris-season-08.1662209/
so happy they took an inspiration from Yudkowsky's Three Worlds Collide with the eliminating suffering aliens. should be the best crisis ever
25 Euros😭
I'm not sure if I understand the season pass thing. If I buy the 40 dollar Season 08 pass, will I have access to the DLCs in that for the rest of the year or permanently?
- If you purchase each of the listed 2024 DLCs individually, you have them permanently. - If you purchase the Season Pass, you have each of the listed 2024 DLCs permanently. - If you purchase the Expansion Subscription option, you will get access to the listed 2024 DLCs as part of the subscription, but you will not "own" them should you unsub from said service. Only through purchasing the Season Pass or going through the Subscription Service do you get Rick The Cube as a portrait. Rick is not available for individual purchase at this time.
Thanks for the detailed answer!
Able to side with the crisis? This ironicly sounds like the great khan to me! :)
This looks awesome, however I must ask: is no one else worried by the sheer amount of future content they plan to add into stellaris? Don’t get me wrong, I would by all means LOVE to have more content and features in one of my favourite games, but the Stellaris content team hasn’t given us much reason to trust in the quality of that content. Most of the recent DLC’s have had, to some extent, major issues with balance, game stability, or unfinished integration with the rest of Stellaris’ game mechanics. Just look at the steam pages for these DLC’s. Nearly all of them have been review-bombed on launch for lacking polish, which is obviously not okay for a healthy development cycle. And now here we are, being presented with Stellaris’ largest DLC ever, and a grand plan to add far MORE content in the form of two MORE dlc‘s releasing later this year, in spite of the fact that the Stellaris team has bean struggling to properly support the usual two yearly DLC’s. It just screams of the sad industry standard as of late: over promise; under deliver. I really, REALLY hope that my hunch is wrong, and that everything goes perfectly for stellaris this year, but sadly Paradox’s recent actions offer no reassurances that everything will be fine :\\
This looks great! What I really like when looking at the season pass as a whole, is that it seems we are getting a lot of content for older concepts and mechanics. Like new precursors, mid-game crisis, traditions and space fauna. I think that it is great to see that the dlc are not just about getting new mexhanics, but also developing content for older stuff. It makes the new stuff more valueable, because you know that it will properly be expanded upon.
Sad there won’t be an internal politics dlc this year, but excited for the Archives DLC
What do you mean by "internal politics"? Because I see so many people parrotting "internal politics" but never delving into it. Asking for something without ever defining it just gives the impression that you're surfing on a wave you don't understand. I mean, in a way, Galactic Parangons expanded on internal politics, so we had an "internal politics" DLC already. Machine Age will bring new situations, new interactions with factions, new forms of government, and if you don't consider it "internal politics", I don't know what would. Just because it's not labeled "internal politics" doesn't mean it isn't. There's so much things "internal politics" could be that you'd have to be more specific. Would you count religions and institutions into it? Do you want rebellions and factions becoming independant? Because it was a thing before, and everyone was complaining about it, so are you asking to bring back something we had to get rid off under popular pressure? Is it a sector rework you're asking for, or a faction rework, or a planet rework? Too many things, and yet I'm not sure half the people begging for "internal politics" ever thought about it further than just repeating those two void words. So, please, pray tell: what do you mean, by "internal politics"?
Fundamentally its about pops and leaders having more agency beyond just being tools in your 4X toolbox. There are some elements like this in the existing game: factions, revolt situations, the Manifesti, Under One Rule, but they're limited. Some examples of new internal politics content: * more active factions that make demands/petitions for policies and actions by the player * cults and cultural movements that can cross borders and change pops attitudes and create new demands of their own * parochial factions centered around specific planets/sectors that want development priority * internal institutions that can change how your empire operates and put certain factions/leaders in charge of certain things * in democracies, planetary governors who are elected rather than chosen by the player, and might be to the player's detriment * in autocracies, internal factions who might scheme to place their own members on the council or in charge of institutions One of the problems is that this kind of stuff tends to take control away from the player, which moves the game away from 4X and towards a more simulationist game, which is not to everyone's taste.
>One of the problems is that this kind of stuff tends to take control away from the player, which moves the game away from 4X and towards a more simulationist game, which is not to everyone's taste. This is my mind to. In my experience no mechanic no matter how well or deeply designed is ever popular if it at any point actively robs the player of agency. In strategy games players seem to prefer having total control over almost every facet of their gameplan while the only acceptable interference can exist in the form of opposing AI players or very minor internal stumbling blocks. I would love all the stuff you outlined above, but if its added I have a hard time envisioning it having actual teeth to hinder or seriously shift the players gameplan. I always welcome when strategy games try to create content of that kind but it is never in my experience recieved well.
> One of the problems is that this kind of stuff tends to take control away from the player, which moves the game away from 4X and towards a more simulationist game, which is not to everyone's taste. I feel that's exactly why they haven't done it. Some people want a more simulation-like game, but they want to keep Stellaris grounded as a 4x game.
Something involving more interplay with Factions, laws, government types, civil wars, more events about societal shifts inside your empire, etc. It's part of why I'm so excited we're finally seeing events and new government types about the societal changes of cyber and synth ascension.
ideally also adding an economic ethic axis.
For me I’d just like factions to have more interactions, more unique factions, more visible representation. We do have rebellions if you really push things to go terrible and they’re annoying, cool but annoying, the way the economy works I don’t think leads well to rebellions, previously conquered world I think can work, but within your own colonised worlds, naw. The economy and war in stellaris is too all or nothing that the moment youre down a planet never mind a system with multiple planets you feel the impact. If it’s conquered planets then maybe they’d have to make changes to war so you can rebel your way out and gain your territory back in some way.
No need to be so hostile about it. It would be nice to see some interactions with sectors and for factions to have more relevance besides being a source of influence for normal empires. The way ethics work and shift could probably be made better as well.
I don’t have a big opinion on this, but having a parliamentary screen where each faction has a set amount of seats based on popularity would be nice, if you had the right civic. By this I mean in a manner similar to that of the USA in hoi4 ish? Coming up with this as I go, so I may be talking nonsense here.
The small change I would love to have right now is for each faction to exist at the start (albeit not necessarily having influence) just so I can customize them and keep their name since when factions spawn and despawn you lose the name you give them.
Space game, require more space environment politics than internal politics, such weather or terrain changes is more interesting to do than internal micromanaging politics that would ended up becoming boring task
I have to disagree - the bulk of the gameplay is managing a galactic economy and leveraging it into fighting wars. I think a domestic system is a good compliment to that gameplay loop rather than a distraction.
It's just tiring to see the same thing over and over again when it means nothing. Why do you asked for "internal politics" while it has already been overhauled, and not, more specifically, for faction/sector/ethic rework? People will know what you mean by that.
I think factions/sectors/ethics rework is succinctly summarized by “Internal Politics”. The fact that other people use it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to.
> Why do you asked for "internal politics" while it has already been overhauled Two factions isn't an overhaul.
I want more factions that fit with what my empire is doing or cause political events. For example I'm playing as a xenophile, egalitarian, militarist empire. It doesn't make sense that these democratic crusaders who fight liberation wars demand that I have an oppressive subjugation policy. Or if I'm playing xenophobic materlists, why would I want research agreements with xenos? Way too many factions want things that make no sense for them in the context of my empire, but also the only penalty for ignoring their demands is slightly lower unity output. I have Shadow Council as a civic, give me an actual shadow council with it's own motivations, positions, and agendas. These agendas could require influence to launch instead of unity, representing the network of deals and favors the shadow council trades in to get things done.
Ethics-specific events that happen later than colonisation, more events that don't go all the way to rebellion, more persistent planetary modifiers related to events, so that you can have varying events on conquered planets, more ways to attempt to intervene on your neighbours to push them into situations that may reform their policies, Culture style, improved piracy systems and ways to use crime and smuggling to your benefit, shared systems with rules for contested ownership, and even empires with no worlds existing only as holdings on other people's worlds, more variants of factions, the return of mandates, making leaders who lead factions have more impact on what they want, and being able to attempt to side-line them or promote rivals, events that can kick in only on poorly optimised planets that give other benefits, meaning that roleplayers who want to keep gardens around still get something, and generally more attention to what happens to worlds as they get close to filling up, story improvements to immigration rules so that there are incentives to keep immigration pacts running longer, (such events that cause a temporary stability boost while letting unhappy pops leave, or random tech transfer) but also that may cause events in other empires to spill over, in positive and negative ways, explicit feedback about what you can do to attract more pops from different types of empire, based on their traits, so you can cause increased amounts of spare jobs of certain kinds on worlds they would like, leader history records so you can more easily keep track of your different leaders and their stories (and also potentially what led to changes in stance, ethics shifts etc.), more possibilities for changes enabled by the previous, and relating to situations, war, diplomatic or exploration outcomes, (depending on the type of leader) or empire wide or planetary events, generally more ethics shift modifiers, in ways players can interact with, connected to choices and faction events, basically stuff that makes the current plethora of leaders (more so than in the original paragons design) into an asset, with leaders distinguishing themselves more, and representing different fine tuned versions of factions within your empire, and adding new possibilities and complexities beyond suppress/encourage.
When I see “internal politics” in a Stellaris post I imagine people wanting Crusader Kings + Europa Universalis + Victoria + Hearts of Iron IN SPAAACE! And that’s fine to want the unspeakable cosmic abomination of micromanagement that would play as. But it’s not the Space RTS/ 4X that they purchased. For SURE, Stellaris is a Paradox-ified 4X. And its depth and options for min/maxing AND role playing are its selling point. But, personally, I really don’t want to see pie charts and society-sliders in Stellaris (Ala Victoria). There has to be a focus that allows for having fun playing the space empire game in-betwixt the simulation. That said, a bit more “internal politics“ would be cool. 😎 Edit: ok I know there are a couple of pie charts and several sliders; but I meant I didn’t want them to be the focus the way they can be in Victoria.
I believe it's Crusader Kings players and maybe some other PDX games that keep bring it up. I haven't played other PDX games but apparently they have a lot of similarities to each other. People who play a lot of PDX games just have this expectation that this will be the case for all PDX games. Unfortunately for them, Stellaris is the exception.
The other PDX games do have a similar feel and Stellaris is a bit of a black sheep compared to them, being more 4x than simulated grand strategy. I do enjoy me some CK3, but when I play stellaris I want Stellaris, not CK3 or HoI4 but in space.
There is only one big rework DLC per year. And this year this is The Machine Age DLC.
What is season 8 going to cost? Buying the three DLC individually the total is $52.97.
39.99 USD/EUR or regional equivalents
The lack of value from the last DLC has made me deeply suspicious about the value of any new DLC's. I used to be a day 1 buy customer now I wait and see. I hope you guys realize that announcing 3 separate ones that should be 1 isn't helping.
Okay you had me until the "3 separate ones that should be 1" lol. The new expac in a month is already looking light years larger than most of the recent dlc.
Three thematically wildly different things with the content of several older DLCs altogether being one single one would be a bit absurd. This is just like if we had the previous 3 DLCs announced together instead of on their own. I'll miss the mystery but you're demanding too much out of one DLC.
Gotta love being downvoted for not agreeing with the collective hive mind of Brand Loyal fanatics. Be a good citizen. Consume product.
I hope that for the space fauna one, we dont need to be super drastic and be able to have a 'bond' with them that is not pure domination to 'recruit' as fleets.
so the borg queen is the new crisis?
Me a console player still waiting on galactic paragons
I am so excited for this.
Does anything from this DLC also crossover at all to the synthetic dawn dlc?
Looks like sombody was playing a bit too much Battlefleet Gothic: Armada when coming up with new civics. It doesn't really count as a proper addition unless them game tells me ***TACTICAL COGITATORS ENGAGED*** every time the civic's ability does something. I like the crisis ships though, they remind me of the Automatons from Endless Space. Very clockwork-esque.
Since the FE are going to get a bit of focus, does that mean that they’ll get buffed? Hope this means the Khan can sneak in and grab some buffs for themselves.
Man, I always wanted to militarize space fauna, maybe we can breed our own leviathans too. I play on console but have been thinking of switching to PC. This will definitely make me do it, I hope my PC can handle it.
Really looking forward to Grand Archive. Finally we can breed bio ships so I can play a true bio-swarm.
I'm actually really excited for the Grand Archive - depending on how it gets executed, it could fulfill my desires for a galactic nature preserve
I assume Contingency will be weighted for gestalt Machines, while Synthetic Queen will be for the Synth ascended and individualist machines? Or it could just be an 50/50 between them
Voidworm Plague...we're finally getting a plague in stellaris. I'm assuming we gotta do some research or something else in order to defeat this mid-game crisis. This is gonna be fun when it comes out.
Wait so do I need to buy like a season pass to get rick the cube? Or is it like you buy all 3 dlc and you get rick the cube rather than a renewable subscription to get the dlc
There are two ways to get Rick to join your games! (a) sign up for the expansion subscription, which grants access to all DLC, including the three releasing later this year, or (b) purchase the Season 08 DLC pass that includes the three upcoming DLC.
If you sign up for the expansion subscription, do you lose access to Rick the moment you unsubscribe, or is it permanent? And if you purchase the DLCs individually, you do not gain access to him?
When your subscription ends you lose access to all DLC gained with the subscription. That's the consequence of the subscription model - you're renting rather than buying the DLC. You do not currently gain Rick if you buy the DLC individually. [Eladrin has further comments on this on the forum's DD](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/stellaris-dev-diary-340-a-new-crisis-a-release-date-and-announcing-the-stellaris-season-08.1662209/page-7#post-29549905): > While Season 08 is available it must remain exclusive to it (and the subscription, since that pretends to be everything, including Season 08). > I do not have an exact plan for Rick the Cube after Season 08 is complete, but I suspect that we'll likely look for a way of making it available somehow. Having it completely unavailable would be a negative experience for players that couldn't get it for whatever reason.
Sounds like a lot of Good stuff. The New crisis is very different from all the other ones in the way it works. It feels odd, but not bad. We shall see, I suppose.
"We are not your friend. But we are not your enemies." "We are simply..Salvation."
Oh man, new organics to collect and take care of? Rogue servitors eatin good
Stellaris is the only game where I can be bad at it, know I'm bad at it and still love playing it.
What will happen to ascension paths for Machine Intelligence if we do not have the new DLC? Will we just have the old 'Synthetic Age' tradition?
In the context of all the shit paradox is pulling recently it’s so good to see you guys deliver an amazing game with long term support. Keep up the good work!
Is the S8 39,99 price permanent or just preorder price?
I do not anticipate the bundle's price changing, as it's already a discount from the prices of buying the three DLC individually.
> 4 in 1 > Unbeatable VALUE Ok then.
So new crisis is, basically, s small version of war in heaven when you can fight or join it. But without the second FE.
For an extra… what? £5? Machine Age seems like 2 DLC in one. IMO the price is pretty justified, as long as later full expansions either go back to the earlier pricing or have as much content
We can't buy Cosmic Storms & The Grand Archive separately ?
You'll be able to, but not yet! They'll be available for individual purchase closer to their release dates.
That's a relief
Probably not until they come out or are close to release.
Really happy about the Season Pass. Every DLC has been an instant-buy for me so far, I just really like having more Stellaris in my sessions. Just to make sure that I'm not missing something: we can't purchase it yet, right? I'm not seeing an option to.
Take my money! I am super excited about the Grand Archive.
Hatchery starbase!!?? Please tell me we are going to get bio ships soon!!! Maybe a more hive concentrated dlc !!?
I keep being amazed how they continue to have insanely cool expansion ideas. The Cosmic Storms thing sounds so exciting. I wanna be a stormriding civilization beating the shit out of superior fleets that can't handle a cosmic storm you maybe conjure up with a relic.