Paradox have announced that 4X space strategy game Stellaris‘s next major overhaul will launch on 5th May, alongside the game’s BioGenesis DLC pack. The latter adds living spaceships together with new civics, traits and megastructures, but I’m more interested in the 4.0 update, which they’re branding the “phoenix update” in that it aims to overhaul performance problems caused by other updates and DLC bloat, while making “guidance and pacing” changes with new players in mind.
It doesn’t sound nearly as exciting on the surface as living spaceships, I’ll grant you, but this is a 4X game, don’t forget – the mythological firebird is in the detail.
Stellaris 4.0 was announced back in January. Let’s start by talking about the promised performance boosts, which are the result of copious rewiring of various empire systems.
“Stellaris has many moving parts, and an incredible number of calculations are performed every month,” reads the announcement post. “Many of those calculations rely on others, forcing them to be performed sequentially rather than in parallel. This causes the game to slow down as the number of calculations increases throughout the game and is especially noticeable in large galaxies – more planets and empires means more pops filling more jobs, producing more resources, with more pathfinding for the fleets, and so on.”
Paradox are trying to lessen the load of the pop and job systems by, essentially, grouping pops later in the game rather than handling them individually. Trade is another system “that has a disproportionately high impact on performance compared to the benefit” so they’re “simplifying that one significantly and making Trade act as a standard resource.” The devs are also looking to streamline how Fleets work, though this’ll likely happen after the release of the 4.0 update.
As for the new player guidance and game pacing element, the Steam post continues that “much of the feedback we’ve received from newer players indicates that Stellaris has become overwhelming in the early stages of the game, providing a flood of decisions and a seemingly endless barrage of notifications.”
They’re addressing this by “reviewing events and notifications to ensure that any interruptions are meaningful” – that’s to say, that they present you with a choice of some kind rather than being “purely informational”. A number of events that are “purely informational”, including Anomalies discovered by Science Ships, have been demoted to smaller “toast” notifications down the righthand side of the interface. Empire Leaders will also be less “needy”, as they’re planning to merge the first two tiers of leader traits and reduce the number of levels at which you’re asked to pick traits.
The game’s galaxy generation, meanwhile, will be tweaked to reduce the odds of encountering solar systems with pre-scripted elements that bump up the number of habitable worlds past the maximum you choose in the settings. There are, of course, a lot of these pre-scripted systems nowadays, because Stellaris has become a quintessentially Paradoxical cauldron of downloadable add-ons, free or paid.
Paradox are also trying to give the average game of Stellaris more backbone by means of “suggested tasks” that are filed under Conquest, Exploration, or Development categories. These reflect a player-chosen “focused aspiration” for your empire, and might involve building a Dyson sphere or, at the top level, becoming Galactic Custodian. Veteran players can probably ignore them, as “they’re primarily intended to teach new players how to play like you and guarantee that you’ll be able to force access to those important technologies.” You’ll be able to trace completed tasks and other endeavours on a new empire timeline, found within the situation log.
As for more general quality of life improvements, they’ve gone through the genetic modification process during species modification and assimilation “to remove many pain points and make the overall flow much smoother”. Truly, a dystopian sentence.
They’re also changing the “Colony” designation to a temporary modifier, and letting players pick a colony designation and “even” turn on automation when giving the colonization order, so that mid-to-late game players don’t have to choose between using automation and losing the amenity and stability bonuses of the default designation. Oh, and they’ve given the ship designer screen a haircut as well.
Read more on Steam. This is the tip of the iceberg, of course, with later posts adding many pounds of flesh to the details sketched out here. The eventual full changelog is going to be an abyssal monster indeed, or my name isn’t Locutus of Borg.
I realise all this probably sounds quite dry to the new players the “phoenix update” is designed to woo. If you’re among them, congrats on making it to the last paragraph of this article – that’s a Dyson Sphere-sized accomplishment right there. Still, I’m always fascinated by attempts to trim and tighten the workings of games as unavoidably baggy and exhausting as this. It reminds me of Civilization 7’s efforts to get around the problem of most players not completing a single game.
