Stellaris Habitats Are Changing

foreign it has been a long summer but ladies and gentlemen developer Diaries are back and they're coming out of the gate with a lot of strength I'd say developer diary 306 is focusing on habitat experiments from the summer projects we are going to be hearing quite a lot about some of the different ideas they had for habitats some of the New Balance changes and new features they're thinking about bringing in it is important to note and this has been stressed throughout this Dev diary everything here is experimental and may or may not make it live but they do want to make some fundamental changes to habitats are these good are these bad well let's dive in and find out more let's start off by asking the important questions why other developers looking at habitats well the Stellaris custodian team and if you don't know about the custodian initiative let me be bringing up to speed very quickly basically people's time is divided between two teams there is the custodian team focused on balance changes free patches and updating previous DLC to bring them in line in terms of quality and content with later releases or better releases should we put it that way and then there is also the crisis team or the crisis time which is when developers focus on new paid DLC content so the custodian team looks to three primary categories when they're deciding what they should pursue the first is directives things dictated by alandrin the game director usually for long-term strategic reasons the second is community things that we have asked for pain points quality of life improvements bug fixes and other great ideas that have been sourced from the community the third category is Passion things that individual developers really want to see added into the game conveniently a lot of times all three of these align quite nicely so we're going to start by looking at the history of habitats in Stellaris habitats were introduced way back in patch 1.5 the bank's update in Utopia then in patch 2.3 wolf alongside ancient relics the developers removed the boy born requirement to build habitats because at the start of the game you did have to get voidborn before you could build them not everyone could build them willy-nilly they also adjusted their habitability a little bit and gave them varying districts based on what they were built over so for example if they were built over a mineral deposit they would provide some mineral districts availability or a research Deposit they would have some research districts this is still implemented in the current version you probably know what I'm talking about speaking of the utopian and ancient relics DLC if you're missing any Stellaris DLC or actually any Paradox stuff there is a sale on now at Humble Bundle so if you'd like to get some good discounts I'd like to point out Overlord is now on sale at a reduced price that's the previous DLC from last year you can follow the link down in the description below to Humble Bundle where you can then search for whatever DLC or product you'd like following that link will also help to support this channel so thank you in advance if you end up doing that you can get 75 off the base game Stellaris and up to 50 off additional DLC until July 31st and then in patch 2.7 the wells patch they made the next major change to habitats adjusting their costs requirements and adding the multiple tier system that is you build a habitat it has four districts available we can upgrade it to the next size that's six and finally get it up to the largest size at eight since then the developers added a couple of special habitat variants and various other reworks have shifted their fortunes up and down in the overall balance of the game around patch 3.0 3.1 they were really strong habitat the void dweller origin was really powerful as of patch 3.8 it has fallen on some hard times definitely aside from being able to spam those governors for the ship build cost reduction which we used to be able to do and are no longer able to they've not really been that strong for a while recently there have been many requests from the community to review the tendency of AI Empires building dozens if not more habitats when they're otherwise unable to expand yes the dreaded AI habitat spam has been a bit of a nuisance for quite a while actually I would say due to how production and population work in Stellaris this did lead to an interesting quandary it is theoretically correct for the AI to create many habitats if it is blocked in you as a player probably would do the same but it was tedious as a player to deal with invading up to a dozen habitats per system the current interactions with population growth have also always been Troublesome on a game balance side so for example with void dweller start because you start with three habitats that means you have three base levels of Pop growth going which can be three times more than a regular Planet which is pretty strong habitats were feeling far too common were too good at certain things and weren't capturing the base fantasy the developers were looking for they're the central pillar of a very popular playstyle that the developers do want to preserve though so this made them a perfect Target for some summer experimentation remember everything in this Dev diary is considered experimental and may or may not make it live all numbers are placeholders for prototyping purposes only yada yada yada right let's see what we are going to be seeing there is no set release date for any of this and they are very much open to community feedback so make sure to write something in the comments if you have an interesting idea if you've got some thoughts or feelings you could also run over to the forums probably and share it but I know some developers do read the comments to these videos hi Alpha if you're watching um so feel free to put down in the comments there were a lot of varying opinions not just amongst the developers but amongst the community at whole we're going to cover some of those now so one of the most common requests from the community was to add a Galaxy slider to restrict the use of habitats options could have ranged from Banning habitats entirely to nobody except void dwellers can create habitats requiring the Ascension perk to build them again restricting only the AI to not be able to build them or placing some sort of hard or soft limit to the number of habitats that could be built the developers also discussed what if habitats cost fractional star-based capacity to build with void dwellers and the voidborn Ascension perk granting discounts to this value this was apparently more appealing since the soft cap would control AI use of habitats nicely without significantly hindering players that wanted to go all in on them these discussions led to some questioning about whether Stellaris habitats were satisfying the general fantasy well enough and whether habitat should be more hard sci-fi with lower habitability bases or even ceilings for those accustomed to planet-bound life and whether they could make changes that would address balance changes like Hive void dwellers something the developers have stayed away from for a long time simply because it would be pretty broken stacking all of that pop production not just pop growth but the pop assembly on habitats and then we have a more complex text so the developers made a list of some of the current challenges caused by the existing habitat system and this led to the idea of what if all the habitats in a system were linked they could retain the interesting expansion of habitats across a system while reducing the burden when seizing the system and potentially address some of the other problems introduced by an excess number of habitats in the galaxy Alfred threw together an incredibly hacky and utterly unshippable version of this according to a ladder in the game director and continued iterating on it throughout the summer under this variant the first habitat built within a system is the central habitat complex additional habitats are support habitats that add additional space and versatility to the central complex and generally this idea has been repeated across all the experiments so it looks relatively clear that unless they don't overhaul habitat what we're going to be getting is one habitat per system with the ability to in essence upgrade that Colony that planet with additional stuff by building more external habitat things around other planets in the system it is a reminder again many values are grossly unbalanced placeholders Etc these are screenshots of the testing so don't look too deeply into the balance of the these numbers ladies and gentlemen just look into the ideas after this aladrin went on vacation so now it's Alfred taking over to talk about his investigations once more into the Alfred first to counteract the expected changes if you didn't have many support habitats the central complex would be small cramped and overall not great to live on this means that Alfred decides to give the void dwellers extra districts and building slots as a unique modifier this did see further refinement in a later prototype as we can see from this image though habitat Max districts plus a whopping 75 percent and even cooler I would argue building slots from habitat districts plus 0.2 so for every five districts of any type I think I think that is any type maybe it's just the habitation District but it doesn't say that specifically but with every five districts you'll be getting an additional one building slot which is really quite good these changes to void dweller though would basically mean void dweller is alongside Gaia world and shattered ring kind of in the fact that you have this one very large planet that you start on our phrase started by making the support habitat a type of megastructure so the first iteration here as I said has support habitats the support complex as a mega structure to build not just the habitat Central complex which is basically your regular habitat inhabited bit The Colony Part the regular planet and then you improve that you increase the number of districts by adding support complexes the habitat Central complex must be built over so planets with minerals energy or research you cannot build it over an empty Planet that's an interesting thing to note here Special Districts will be available to collect these resources again remember this is just one flavor of the experiments that we're going to be looking through things will be changing as we look through more looking through these images for the support habitat will notice that as you upgrade it you get more additional building slots you don't get more maximum districts it's still just plus one maximum districts from each of these support habitat complexes but we will get more housing and weirdly less habitability at the final level on top of that as well the advanced support habitat that allows your resource extraction facilities on the orbited planets moons to also be supported by the habitat complex why is that important well in this prototype the developers had the maximum amount of each type of resource collection District be that energy minerals or research limited by the size of the deposits the habitats were constructed over not just the base habitat the central one but also those additional support complexes this would be similar to how buildings for strategic resources are limited so let's say for example there are plus five minerals in the system and plus seven energy that means you could have five mining districts and seven energy districts quite an interesting idea support habitats provided additional districts building slots and housing to the habitat Central complex the reason for the reduced habitability is meant to be reflecting civilian traffic between the habitat as they are upgraded the final tier allows as I said the habitat complex to use deposits on the moons of other orbited planets on the surface this prototype seems to satisfy the initial requirements and more conquering systems with habitat spam was easier due to their only being one functional Planet per system constructing multiple habitats per system felt rewarding As It upgraded your existing Colony the removal of multiple starting colonies removed one of our main concerns for allowing Hive Minds to have access to the void dweller origin their high pop growth rate due to excessive numbers of spawning pools in the early game Iggy one of the developers has also had some thoughts on this that he will be mentioning in a future Dev diary as well which is very interesting to hear so what we're currently looking at here is the habitat Central complex the only actual Colony you'll get in the system this has 28 pops on it's got I'm going to assume pretty high habitation value we've got 85 available housing which is absolutely massive so this is going to get quite a lot of decent logistic pop growth but yeah basically this may feel a lot more like a Gaia world origin however you can expand that Gaia world and build additional guy built in adjacent systems just like you've always been able to do with void dwellers with regular habitats it does however leave the system itself rather cluttered with all of these megastructures all of these Advanced support habitats as we can see from this image just the one Colony but so much stuff to see on our screen the support habitats as well can't be interacted with outside of being upgraded which for Alfrey felt like a major downside enemy ships would happily fly past and ignore the support habitats they couldn't be Specialized or downgraded All Things Considered this prototype showed that making habitats into a single logical Planet spread across many entities in a solar system felt good but megastructures was not the path forward ladies and gentlemen enter support habitats as star bases and if you're enjoying this video please inhabit that like button the second iteration of this prototype investigated treating support habitat as special star bases much like orbital rings in this prototype the districts available to the habitat Central complexes depend on the configuration of any support habitats in the same system thus construction of a habitat Central complex would automatically build a neighboring support habitat in orbit of the same planet when built a support habitat would start with a module that matches any deposits on the planet it orbits each district module on a support habitat gives plus three maximum districts of that type to the habitat Central complex upgrading the support habitat still provides the same modifiers as shown in the megastructure Prototype additionally each tier of the support habitat allows construction of an additional support habitat module and the second and third tiers allow construction of a support habitat building so basically it's like orbital rings but for habitats and you can build them in orbit of any Celestial body in the system or any primary Celestial body I assume still no moons that's what we're seeing by looking at this screenshot at least the starting habitat Central complex and its neighboring support habitat for a void dweller Empire there is a research module built here and we could also upgrade this starbase-like thing to the next level to the expanded support complex and here we have a newly constructed habitat Central complex which is completely unspecialized that's why it has no other specialist districts interestingly it looks like even things like the trade and Entertainment District would be part of what a habitat support complex gives to your central habitat it has nine apparently districts it can build right out of the gate so that's pretty big so far allowing the choice of which districts the habitat Central complex has access to Via the specialization of support habitats brought some interesting changes to how habitat-dependent Empires will play due to the nature of the Prototype the buildings for support habitats haven't seen much investigation yet but would likely include buildings much like those on an orbital ring they would probably also have the lunar extraction support that advanced support habitats experimented with in the megastructure Prototype above had and other such buildings that would be wild this would mean that habitats would in essence get access to orbital rings I'm assuming they would limit it to one per system in terms of the alloy building otherwise you would be able to with habitat stack an insane level of alloy bonuses that would be completely broken and kind of hilarious I'm assuming they'll have blocked that by comparison here is a research habitat complex using some of the district capacity to also provide some hydroponic districts this would be very very powerful this darn single habitat here is producing 1 000 research because it can stack 13 research districts this would be really really powerful it does really depend on how many Alloys you have to spend on each of those additional support habitats and then the additional uh modules to put on those support habitats if they move forward with this prototype due to the nature of the summer experiments Alfred cannot say if or when this prototype might make it into the live version of the game but it's something that he is interested in exploring further but the fourth one stayed up Elantra now takes over and says a big thank you to Alfrey so that variant listed achieved a lot of the goals that the developers were looking for but was cobbled together out of the scripting equivalent of sticks and Twine as a quick and dirty implementation it also required a lot of back and forth clicking that the devs really weren't too fond of so after that one burned down fell over and uh and sank into the swamp they came up with another iteration aladrin's feedback was simplify things the latest variant that they'd been playing with has been especially promising in this one they turned the star-based style support habitat into single-tiered pre-specialized units renamed to orbitals for ux purposes rather than requiring modules to be built on them so you could build a mining orbital a research orbital and so on this dramatically simplified the flow of building out habitats while simultane improving the implementation here we can see the fragments orbital this is apparently a pre-specialized research orbital so after you build it I assume we can build it in a specialized version but that's not quite what it said before so I am slightly confused this is also going to allow the devs to create new buildings for that Central habitat here we see the habitat Transit Hub this is adding maintenance drone jobs housing Max districts as well as increasing the benefits but also upkeep um of this building for each orbital you have in the system so the bigger the forest of habitats you have the better some of these buildings will be by the look of things this one could also be upgraded to the habitat Transit interchange giving you even more housing even more max districts and also even more I think jobs here yeah pretty cool I assume there'll be other types of building as well similar to what we had with orbital rings that kind of building so possibly some bonuses to Alloys energy that sort of stuff but now on the habitat and scaled with the number of orbitals we get in the system and the one thing I missed out actually because we get a nice look here at the habitat Transit interchange is it also gives plus three building slots as well now the devs are still doing some experimentation with this model but so far they're liking what they're seeing Technologies can add special orbital types or buildings that can modify the primary habitat complex and it is very easy for the devs or modders to add new types this means we could see things such as or I don't know Fortress orbitals possibly um maybe uh we team research almost maybe alloy orbitals all sorts of different things definitely probably Unity orbitals dreaded clerk orbitals maybe Merchant orbitals trade-based things all sorts of very flavorful bits and pieces that we can put out there in our systems probably this is going to make void dwellers um slightly better in some ways but worse in others it really will come down to the balance on how much exactly habitats are going to take to put out there and how much each of these orbiters will cost to build in Alloys if they shift the cost for orbitals from Alloys into something like minerals this becomes much much better though I suspect they won't do that the developers have also been looking at jobs per District as well the complexes have different challenges from the older habitat system and the devs have also further updated the old voidborn Ascension perk void dwellers will start with its effects similar to how teachers the Shroud Empires effectively start with mind over matter I wonder if this means they cannot take the voidborn effect they can't take the voidborn Ascension book or if they can stack it twice because if they can this is going to be pretty powerful let's look into this so void dwellers will get plus 50 habitat Max districts plus 0.2 building slots from habitat districts so every five districts is one building slot and plus one jobs from habitat districts now that is identical to what we're going to be getting from voidborn except voidborn as well let's look at that so voidborn just like void dweller will be giving plus 0.2 building slots from habitat districts that's one per five district and plus one jobs from habitat districts which is pretty wild also minus 20 habitat build costs so as a void dweller if that's your origin you'll probably if you're allowed to want to take void Bond as your very first Ascension pick thus reducing your habitat build cost also I believe expansion uh I think further reduces habitat build cost by 20 here so you could be looking at a 40 reduction to habitat build cost which combined would be very very useful maybe we might with these changes start seeing void dweller closer to the matter I'm not sure it's going to get entirely matter it really does as I said depend on where the numbers boil out but I have hope void dweller might be good once again for now the game director would like our thoughts your thoughts on what we have seen today this will allow them to bring our thoughts into their own internal design discussions it'd also be great to get feedback on whether we like this sort of Dev diary where the devs go into detail and the overall process including the failures I personally enjoy it I mean it gives me more to read and more to talk about let me know if you've enjoyed it down in the comments below as well because I mean I think it's been fun next week we're going to be talking about a summer experiment relating to leaders that didn't pan out quite so well and what they plan on doing now in order to proceed forwards after that uh failure allegedly that's going to be interesting otherwise until next time I've been mom too if you've enjoyed this video about Stellaris and you'd like to see a video where I attempt to conquer the entire galaxy with only 100 pops and without ever taking a single vassal click the video on screen now

Channel: Montu Plays

Views: 72,882

Keywords: Stellaris, stellaris gameplay, montu plays, montu plays stellaris, stellairs news, stellaris update, stellaris dev diary, stellaris habitats

Id: 9JYs2ccPipc

Length: 25min 34sec (1534 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 27 2023