Stellaris: Space Politics Patch Incoming

Paradox’s grand space opera RTS Stellaris recently saw a patch along with the Leviathans DLC that added plenty of amazing things like spess dwagons and merchant stations; but Paradox made it clear that they were already hard at work revamping their breakout hit with the upcoming 1.5 “Banks” Patch. So far this patch has been teased with two forum articles detailing both expansion and free features, as their current strategy is to release the major content as an expansion and the balancing stuff that makes the expansion work is free for all users.

Last week it was teased that there will be a large series of Ascension and Tradition trees that unlock specialized perks for specializing your empire. These appear to gigantic bonuses like the accompanying image boasting a 33% increase to damage against the intensely strong Fallen Empires that lurk in the galaxy; and there are supposed to be a lot of these types of bonuses. These all work towards either Psionic, Cybernetic, or Biogenetic transcendence for the species. This all allows a player to specialize their empire into an even more distinct playstyle. The post also teases the possibility of special buildings and stations becoming available through these perks.

But the juicy post released today is almost entirely about politics. Currently you have the single species you start with as your “Founder” species and you can later include others but the game only differentiates between that species and “everybody else”. The Alien Rights system allows you to specify the political rights of every species in your empire and opens up a whole new spectrum of galactic atrocities. The free half of this feature covers the ability to denote who is/isn’t sponsored by the state and whether or not your core worlds accept refugees from other empires; while the paid half is what is going to be creating those refugees. Part of the expansion includes being able to choose what type of slavery and purge policy to enact for each species. You can now automatically set your planets to enslave miners, toggle a species as livestock, chemically neuter whole populations, and more. Generic slavery and genocide was available before, but now different scales of messed up methods will be offered. Oh, and population uses a varying amount of minerals as upkeep, but meh.

The December 5 “Kennedy” update was a gigantic leap in the right direction because it fixed a few of the serious problems with the vanilla game including nerfing the ever-loving bejeezus out of torpedoes and removing colonization technology. It also made Pacifists playable by removing the flat damage penalty they used to get. In general it also made playing Hyperlane empires much easier because it wrangled the NPC monsters to specific systems instead of randomly scattering them around and making them move about. Because civilian ships are typically always put on evade it just lead to having to constantly reset your science ship command lists because they would forget all of their orders at the first sight of an enemy. And it does not help that the “Auto explore” feature is a technology unlocked at late game.

My issue with the Leviathans/Horizon story pack accompanying “Kennedy” is it’s trying to force the player to pay attention to their narrative instead of the player forming their own narrative; it’s entirely about learning about the big monsters you can kill in the game world. And they have huge skulls next to their power ratings so you don’t really know when you can even attack them. Meanwhile I am playing something wacky like a race of cactus pacifist hippies, this is the legend of my damned empire! So a DLC entirely around space racism and politics seems right at home here. These changes are going to make identifying empires much more fun, as you’ll be able to encounter a broader range of interesting characters past the Nice/Mean dichotomy right now.

I am absolutely loving what we’re hearing about the new “Banks” patch coming in the next few months. Emigration only happens right now in Stellaris when you have a migration treaty with another empire that has a planet your species would be interested in. The AI loves to use slavery, and probably purges too. This is a feature you are going to run into very often, and I imagine that in larger games having an open refugee policy will be integral to rapid expansion. The kiddy gloves are off,  and I’m hoping that a further blog post comes out next week detailing some sort of space UN or federation feature that lets you control the rampant atrocities that will be happening in a post-Banks galaxy.

You can get Stellaris now on Steam along with the recent Leviathans DLC; and the “Bank” patch and DLC are coming within the next few months.