Stellaris Lithoids DLC Updated, Ascension Paths & More

clobber in time a mammoth amount of new information has just dropped for Stellaris patch 3.9 which we now know will be coming in at least 30 days if not a bit longer we're starting off with some unfortunate bad news I have to say it it is bad news and then we'll be diving into more of the juicy stuff the juicy stuff includes massive reworks to the lithoids species packs that is reworked to one of the origins reworks with new Civics two of them that we're going to get to look at that's pretty cool and additionally new artwork as well so new portraits coming with not just the lithoids pack but some other packs as well after that we'll be looking at how Ascension paths are changing just a little bit again we're getting rid of RNG and we're basically making psionic the best Ascension in the game I I can't really see any other way around this stick around for that as well as a bit of a reformatting culling purging of no nodes if you thought that nodes were annoying you can't swap them out well ladies and gentlemen I've got some good news for you I will put chapters in there's going to be some ranting at certain points so feel free to jump around but without any further Ado let's dive straight in to that unfortunate news I talked about right at the beginning we're going to start with the bad news the bad news is that the developers have an announcement regarding species pack pricing Stellaris species pack started as a purely cosmetic add-on consisting of portraits ship sets city sets and advisor voices they have since then come a long way now including a much greater variety of content while the exact spreader features varies by pack they now all include things such as Origins Civics traits events and new mechanics as game director aladrin is especially pleased with how the custodian team has improved the quality of the older packs they've added new play Styles and enabled many more sci-fi tropes to be explored during our games alright before I get into this graphic I'm going to give you a quick tldr and point out that I'm putting chapters in skip ahead if you don't want to hear me ramble about this price increase the tldr is the price of the packs you're seeing on your screen now is going up two dollars very soon and that's not great if you don't hear me ramble about it for the next five minutes skip ahead there are chapters below otherwise let's dive in so we can currently see with this nice graphic the devs have made what has been added to the species packs humanoids plantoids lithoids and necroids by the custodian team since release that is all on the left hand side you can see there's a bunch of civics a bunch of Origins a bunch of traits varied between pack and some do also require other DLC to actually be used that's mainly in the lithoid and necroid packs and then on the right hand side we've got a whole bunch of different things that are going to be coming to the various species packs with Caleb we're going to be getting into these in just a moment or at least some of these in this Dev diary so stick around but why are we looking at this graphic well with the changes coming in 3.9 the game director believes that the older species packs will now be on par with the newer ones and therefore they're planning on increasing the base price of the plantoids humanoids lithoids and necroid species packs from 7.99 to match the 9.99 base price of the more recent Aquatics and toxoid species packs if you're in Europe I think that's the same price but in euros and if you're in the UK um well the pound's pretty weak at the moment it's probably like 50 pence cheaper which overall kind of makes it more expensive per the promise made by Frederick Wester several years ago they are announcing this change ahead of time so that anyone who wishes to purchase them at the current base prices will have an opportunity to do so they will be available with the current base price for at least 30 days and will be changing alongside the release of 3.9 Caleb that means that 3.9 Calum will not be released before September 8th because if it comes out on September 8th or earlier that will be within 30 days and therefore not alongside the release of Caleb it is important to note and the devs have put this in bold red text Stellaris will be taking part in the steam strategy Fest this will give everybody a chance to get the affected species packs at a discounted price before the price change goes into effect on top of that there will probably be another Humble Bundle sale to go alongside the Steam Sale there generally tends to be a Humble Bundle sale slightly after words the reason I bring up Humble Bundle is that anybody who purchases something from Humble Bundle using the link I have down in the description will also be supporting this Channel and I believe also supporting charity and hopefully getting your hands on good discounts anywho what does this make me feel like well it never feels good when there's a price rise I do understand that there is more content now in these species packs specifically you know humanoid plantoid lithoids necroids sure there's more stuff in them and they have been working on these packs for some time now you know lithoids for example came out quite a few years ago so the custodians have been still adding things to it for the last couple of years quite a few years after release and we do want them to do that however if the plan with the custodians is not necessarily to add um free content I mean if you have the DLC yes it's all free content but to increase prices based on work that's meant to be for free content that's not quite the pitch that was pitched to all of us and it doesn't feel great if you've already got the DLC it's totally not an issue and you can basically ignore it because you're not going to be paying higher prices but this means anyone coming into Stellaris is going to have if they want to get their hands on all of the extra DLC an extra eight dollars they will have to spend which is basically the full price of one of these species packs before the price rise that's not nothing I know eight dollars isn't that much these days what with inflation and all of these other things but it's it's not nothing and it's another barrier to entry for Stellaris um I don't know what the full price now of all of the DLC put together is but unless you get it on sale which I would definitely recommend and that's why I constantly post whenever there's a Humble Bundle sale on it's very very expensive to get the full Stellaris experience which is what you generally see when I'm playing on my channel so whilst this doesn't affect me and it doesn't affect a lot of other players I'm not entirely convinced this was necessary these packs are quite old um they've been out for some time yes they have been worked on but the plan with custodians as far as it was pitched was that that was all to add to uh existing packs add to existing DLC and base game content and improve the game without increasing its pricing if the plan with the custodians is to increase pricing that's a very different model that we've not been told about until now at the end of the day Paradox is a public company they can do whatever they want with their prices absolutely though you have to ask is this really necessary when they're enjoying I think it's like a 40 or 50 increase in profit in the last 12 months and I think they had another 30 or 40 increase to 12 months before so this price increase doesn't really feel good um for sure I don't want to ramble on about this for too long and also please please please do not take to the forums and start insulting and shouting at developer us there is almost certainly no point they have probably had absolutely no say in this price increase I imagine the game director has had some but generally this seems like a business decision that the business has made and it's just a shame for new players coming into this game welcome to the good news if you've skipped ahead I totally understand if you stuck with me through the rambling I salute you and commiserations but what is going to be improved well things that rock elantrin's very first Dev diary 157 was things that rock his first DLC was also the lithoids pack as far as I know and let's dive into this so the lithoid species pack was one of the first that wasn't exclusively an art pack the lithoid trait added interesting game mechanics to the phenotype they had a few lithoid specific traits some event changes and the terrible variant of the devouring swarm the purely cosmetic species packs have been up dated in subsequent releases but while it did get an origin in federations and a couple more traits in the 3.5 fornax update lithoids hadn't gotten quite as much of an update from the custodian team as the other packs of quartz thought um thought aladrant and that is quartz q-u-a-r-t-z oh joy of quartz aladrin thought we should dig up some improvements now he's going to turn things over to Iggy to talk us through these changes so since the release of Galactic Paragons the custodian team has been working on improving the value and quality of older DLCs today Iggy will be telling us all about what he has done for the lithoid species pack step one buffing the old as shown in devdari 305 they've returned to calamitous birth to give it some much-needed love this includes removing the habitability loss from lithoid craters for lithoid pops as well as increasing the effectiveness of lithoid exclusive traits such as gaseous byproducts on the massive crater world what on Earth does all of this mean well calamitous birth and itself basically is the same we're getting the massive crater we're getting four buried lithoids we will get lithoid meteorites available as colony ships and planets colonized with lithoid meteorites will get two buried lithoids and a lip avoid crater planetary modifier as well as allowing us to build the experimental crater on our subject colonies that is all the same however the massive crater and the lithoid crater are changing so first off that massive crater on your home world it's been updated it now gives effective lithoid traits plus 50 percent that is a minor bonus but quite a nice one to have that is your extra crystals or gases or whatever it is that you have on your litho pops you're going to be getting more from I hope it also boosts the special lithoid trait for getting budding the lithoid equivalent of that if it does this could be very very powerful you'll get more districts more mining districts less agricultural districts that's normal and then a big one here it's no longer minus 50 habitability across the board it's minus 50 habitability only for non-lift pops so your lithoid pops will still be at full habitability they will get no negative modifiers from this crater which kind of makes sense you will still get though that lovely plus 25 pop growth speed bonus meaning your lithoids will grow at a regular rate on your capital combining that with the crystallization trait I think that's what it's called the lithoid version of budding this could actually be relatively powerful especially when we combine it with the habitability effects of lithoid crater which is just like the capital getting a change giving minus 50 habitability only for non-lithoid pops so you could go out and colonize lots and lots of Worlds and basically make them completely uninhabitable for any non-lithoids you find out there in the galaxy this is in some ways better than tomb worlds because that minus 50 will be very very nasty very difficult to overcome and I believe in completely impossible to remove unless you fully terraform the planet but even then I'm not sure it goes away this would be a very nasty build and I'm kind of interested to try it out the devs have also talked about how Terribles have gotten a glow up in some previous Dev Diaries no longer will you need to sit and click a decision every six months as you consume your world now it will all be handled in a handy compact situation the output should still be exactly the same as before thanks to clever scripting mathematics so don't worry about this being a Nerf to acquired pops or resources consume World effect so I think you start a decision that then triggers a situation so you won't have to keep coming back to be doing this consume world as a quality of life Improvement well I think that's pretty nice so that was some of the reworks that we're getting now in with the new items not satisfied with only buffing these two old pieces of content the devs also felt like the species pack could do with a bit of a Polish to stack up to current species packs first up the new void Hive Civic this one seems really interesting I haven't quite done the numbers on it yet but it might be potentially game breaking Hive content what a shock and to be honest hives don't need the best content right now they're already fundamentally very very powerful but hey ho let's go as you can see this is a hive Civic with quite a unique effect and if the habitat changes we discussed a few weeks ago actually come through it would be a very powerful addition to your Void dweller Hive Minds the void Hive Civic the hive mind has made space yet another of its domains specially evolved drones are capable of spending entire life cycles without ever entering a World's atmosphere what are the effects well first up every four months you are automatically generate that means you will get for free a mining or research station over a random unexploited deposit in a system you own now I don't think that is every four months per system I think that is every four months you get a free mining or research station this means you never have to build mining in research stations that's going to save you quite a few minerals wow that's good not only is that happening well if you lack the technology to exploit a given resource your output will be reduced there by 75 percent that sounds like a problem it is not that is a massive bonus what that means is you do not need the technology for dark matter to harvesting in order to be able to harvest dark matter you will just get a 75 reduction to your income of dark matter from the Dark Matter deposits where you randomly getting mining stations spawn holy moly that is wild and if that weren't enough they're also adding in some extra modifiers for your Empire you'll get mega structure build cost decreased and megastructure build speed increased by a modest 10 that's not much but it is still something and will hopefully stack with other megastructure build speed increases so possibly we can get the fastest Mega structures ever now here comes the rub you're going to get mining station and research station Unity cost plus 10. that's not plus 10 that is a flat plus 10 Unity however don't be too alarmed this isn't quite what you think I think it's some bad UI elements here because this isn't a monthly Unity cost upkeep this is a one-off build cost whenever you want to build a mining or research station and to be honest why would you you're going to get them for free you'll also get plus 25 growth node experience gain which is nice but really need either here nor there this Civic plays around with the flavor of a hive mind that is capable of surviving out in space and is surviving the dangers of vacuum while you can still build Gathering stations it goes against your nature to instruct specific drones to do so and will cost you some Unity they also excel at creating structures in space whether they be habitats Dyson spheres or hyper relays so get out into the Dark Void already the other new Civic added to the lithoid species pack is selective kinship this Civic is not for xenophiles so please avert your ocular organs if you're of the xenophilic persuasion all right only the xenophobes left great let's dive in so selective kinship in an uncertain Universe only kin can be trusted this civilization is selective about the species it defines as equals what are the requirements well you cannot be a xenophile or fanatic egalitarian you must not have fnatic purifiers and you cannot take synthetic Ascension alongside this Civic this basically means if you want to synthetically ascend you're going to have to swap it out importantly you're not forced into being a lithoid so anyone can take selective kinship no matter what their phenotype if you're not sure what phenotype is because that's going to become important throughout this Civic the different phenotypes in the game are things like lithoid mammalian reptilian that sort of stuff each of those is an individual phenotype this will give you opinion of Empire with Chad phenotype plus 100 opinion of other Empires minus 50. yeah you're a space racist pops of our phenotype have full citizenship other pops are barred from Full citizenship it's a weird one but um let's keep going modifiers citizen happiness while sharing planet with same phenotype plus seven and a half percent citizen happiness while oppressing other phenotypes plus two and a half percent so as long as you get one slave of another phenotype on your planet and you also have some other phenotype on your Capital as well for example maybe this would work really really really nicely with a necrophage origin where you're going to be able to choose two of the same phenotypes to start on your Capital World thus getting this seven and a half percent bonus and if you're lucky one of the two primitive civilizations will be a different phenotype allowing you to enslave and oppress them granting you another two and a half percent happiness bonus for a 10 happiness bonus on all of your worlds right from the get-go that isn't game breaking there are better ways of doing this with other Civics but in terms of flavor it'll definitely be very very fun you will get a council position speaker for the kin granting you an empire-wide effect per skill level of Citizen political power plus two percent that can stack up to 20 I guess with other bonuses you're looking at what 24 26 if you are oligar kick and you've completed certain Traditions that's not amazing but it could be nice you will get some additional uh pop Unity production from your different political power weightings and your factions the devs have made two notes on the Civic the first off is meet they're made out of meat because obviously meat is disgusting and the second note is don't think it'll be smooth sailing because you won't like anyone not conforming to your standards and they will really not like your bigoted way of thinking however if you really want to have some friends the hegemon and Common Ground origin will ensure that your member nations are your phenotype if you choose to start with this Civic this does not add anything game breaking I don't think looking at it what it does add is interesting flavor and role play potential if you've always wanted to run as some properly weird space racists that do have a specific phenotype they think is better than the others oh my goodness me I guess this really does allow for some um questionable playthrough opportunities though it is fun to be able to explore things that would generally be completely Taboo in a normal setting through something like Stellaris something which is very much fantasy or science fiction that's kind of the point of this stuff um and also you know just because you play xenophobe doesn't make you a xenophobe in real life please don't be a xenophobe in real life insert all of that kind of stuff here the eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed there is yet more coming from that road map I showed off right at the beginning of this video next up we get to look at some of the new portraits Yes you heard me correctly new portraits they will be adding into the already existing species pack so they've been having a lot of questionnaires and feedback sessions with players and one thing the devs uh have heard often is a request for more relatable characters in the various phenotypes more humanoid characters while of course the developers will continue creating horrific alien monstrosities to their hearts content the art team took this opportunity to add a few new portraits to lithoids plantoids and humanoids that is pretty cool it's not just one eye that we're getting a few new portraits all together Wow first up we have what I believe is kind of a humanoid lithoid portrait Obsidian Skin variant on the top geode skin variant on the bottom I think I really like geode how the geode is kind of like our hair I quite like that still in development but um Lava Flow Shader so that's going to be changing color as we go up and down the model these guys look pretty cool it's like a bit like a tholian I want to say from Star Trek but in a humanoid form definitely definitely into that for lithoid the Federated Theon preservers will be a new prescripted Empire that begins on the desert world of Thayer in the titawin system there is a bunch of flavor attacks I'm going to go through that in a moment but first off let's look at this interesting pre-scripted Empire so they are an errantic bureaucracy they're oligarchic they have mining Guild which means you're going to be getting extra minerals both for building things and feeding your rock people the fans you're also industrious for even more mineral output that's kind of cool gaseous byproducts will be improved yet further due to calamitous birth so you will be getting a steady drip of exotic gases all throughout the game pacifist is somewhat of an issue at least it's not fnatic pacifist so you can still do Liberation Wars and the like fnatic materialist is definitely cool this could be a fun Little pre-scripted Empire to play with billions of years ago two planets formed from the primordial material in orbit of Seoul ancient Earth and Thea rudimentary life evolved on both worlds biological in the case of Earth lithoid on Thayer for eons these sister planets maintained a peaceful revolution around their star then came the cataclysm the planet collided and in the moment of impact microbial life was exchanged Earth survived and Luna was formed but what remained of fear was jettisoned from the system on this rocky colony ship life from ancient theyre traversed the void before it was caught in the gravity well of the star titoing crashing into one of the systems worlds a new species was introduced to the local biosphere a few short Millennia later the thanes took to the Stars seeking to understand the universe as well as their own Heritage so either they've been drifting for what 1.4 billion years when did the moon crash somebody probably knows in the comments I think it was 1.4 billion um or maybe it was before that I'm pretty sure 1.4 billion of the top of my head but that means they were drifting for billions or a billion years before they finally made their way to titawin or there's some weird Spacey wacey tiny whimy stuff going on if you find Saul in the same galaxy either way I love this backstory this is absolutely fantastic I might even joink it for a Stellaris timeline today at some point in the future this is turning into quite a hefty video so next up on the massive list of changes we're going through today are some very interesting changes coming to Ascension paths and new Ascension path agendas basically I think this might make the psionic Ascension the most powerful Ascension in the game hands down because it is completely taking out the RNG requirements for all of the Ascension paths kind of some players have commented that they often find themselves saving an Ascension perk slot for an indeterminate amount of time waiting for the required research for their desired Ascension path to appear the Ascension perks that unlock the four Ascension paths have had their requirements changed so that now you can only take an Ascension perk as your third Ascension perk at the earliest instead of as your second they have also removed the technology requirements and moved those into the tradition tree associated with that Ascension path instead not picking that tree oh no no so looking at engineered Evolution here we can see that in order to pick this one we must take two other Ascension perks first however there is absolutely no requirement for the gene tailoring technology this grants us access to the genetics tradition tree and unlocks the agenda engineered Evolution which grants genetic Technologies as a research option alrighty now you can start to see why this is going to be very very powerful for a psionic Ascension looking at psionics here you can see you still get the special agenda that comes with the tradition that is psionic supremacy but of course we'll also have a new agenda that allows us to unlock the psionic theory technology in order to take anything after adopting this tradition that is any of the additional tradition picks we will need to research psionic Theory first we could get that normally or now we can pursue an agenda and complete it in order to guarantee that research will spawn each Ascension path now has an agenda that grants 25 progress in Technologies associated with that Ascension path which should ensure that you are no longer reliant on random chance to acquire these Technologies these agendas have a reduced cost and cooldown compared to normal agendas so they will actually complete even faster than normal agendas though some have modifiers based on Empire ethics compatibility with the Ascension path I'm assuming then if you are for example fanatic materialist you cannot do the Mind Over Matter agenda which is the one we're currently looking at in the same amount of time as if you are spiritualist I imagine as we can see here basically all this does is grants us a 25 progress on psionic theory that is really really good coupling that with the fact that we can get Traditions out faster generally as a spiritualist Empire or a Unity focused Empire and given that if we're going down that path unable to get psionic Ascension out as fast as possible it really does become the most powerful given that speed boost because we won't have to do any other special projects we simply unlock it and we start getting bonuses that is very very exciting and it is kind of nice that the random number generator will no longer keep anyone out of the Shroud if they want to risk it for a biscuit it's also going to be interesting what effect this has on teachers of the Shroud who can take the psionic tradition right away from the start of the game if they so wish most other Empires will be locked into not picking it until they are at their fourth tradition pick however as teachers of the Shroud you can get it second third well even first if you want to you will have to complete psionic Theory to progress into it but that shouldn't be too difficult I'm interested to see what this is going to mean going forwards looking over here at the engineered Evolution agenda you can see it's unlocking genome mapping which is quite a bit before I believe quite a bit before the gene tailoring technology we're going to need to progress down that Ascension path this is because the agenda will unlock the next relevant technology and it will advance to the next one along if you finish some research while the agenda is ongoing so if you finish genome mapping while this is ongoing it will instead unlock the next one which I think would be uh Gene tailoring but maybe I'm wrong let me know down in the comments overall this is really quite a fun change it's going to take away some of the RNG that didn't feel good definitely in favor of things that didn't feel good being removed from the game and if you're enjoying this video please eliminate the RNG of that like button now we're going to dive into some of the changes coming to nodes nodes are similar to counselors for regular Empires but you get them for machine and hive mind Empires and you get all five right from the start of the game if you include your leader in this there's four nodes plus your ruler and they never die however that has been leading to some issues not just from a mechanical point of view but also a fun point of view so one of the complaints that they've had is with guest out councils nodes cannot be replaced unlike the counselors for regular Empires this means that you are locked forever into traits that might not be useful for your nodes after the early game and then you know you end up wanting different traits the better in the mid to late game you're not having to choose between well this trait is good now and will put me in a strong position later on but later on it will be completely useless to solve this the developers are giving you access to RM minus RF slash node slash regulatory it's gonna be pretty fantastic so they've added three new Society Technologies to machine intelligences and Hive mines which unlock a set of new Council agendas that allow you to replace the existing nodes after a bit of reformatting or vivisection you can see from these Technologies right at the bottom we have rudimentary node reformatting unlocking the node reformatting agenda we'll look at that in a moment and as you go further at this Tech Tree you're going to get restored node additional skill plus two more counselor experience game and finally effective counselor skill plus one so your nodes when you reformat them will come back better at higher skill levels which is great and you'll also get more effective counselor skills on top of that also fantastic here are the four agendas one per node you cannot unfortunately reformat your ruler though I think actually at the moment there is an agenda already to kill off your ruler and get rid of negative traits possibly though maybe it doesn't kill them off I think it just gets rid of the negative traits yeah hopefully we could kill off our ruler as well because surely they're a node just like any other here we're looking at reformatting the regulatory node interestingly when you start it your regulatory node gets extra experience and then when you kill it well the node will be reformatted this creates a new regulatory node of skill 5. I believe it's five because we've got both Technologies enabled here so plus four or plus two twice getting to that total of five otherwise I assume it comes in at level one or maybe it has something to do with the previous level of the node so if you read format level 10 node it comes in at level five a level four node comes in at level two maybe interestingly getting that extra experience gain for the node before we kill it kind of means we're left with a weird Choice when we finally reformat the node of do we keep it because it's had extra experience or do we really go through with this reformatting process bit of an odd one not sure what the the intention is behind that plus 50 experience game but um hopefully someone can figure it out or we find out from one of the devs maybe in a future Dev diary and it is clarified a little further down the newly created nodes will start at level one depending on your Technologies Traditions Civics uh etc etc they will not start at a maximum level above the reformatted or cold node either so you can't end up getting your node ahead of where it used to be which is a good inclusion we've also had a little teaser for next week's Dev diary as well so next week's Dev die is going to be on improvements to the plantoid species pack and some other changes coming in 3.9 Caleb we know that we're going to be getting an origin a species trait and a new portrait along with Polish to existing civics as you might have noticed what you're seeing here is not plantoids but we'll get to meet them next week maybe it's some sort of um bird sanctuary type origin or Civic where it's all about protecting the birds the plants want the birds to live I I'm really I'm really intrigued to see what this is going to be a do it for them says the image as well before we before we ignore it what do you think this means let me know down in the comments below give me an absolute wrong answer please actually feel free to guess what you think it might be but a wrong answers are preferred I'm gonna say this definitely means we're getting an owl Hatchery Civic 100 confirmed next week only only if you take a plantoid species portrait though if you've enjoyed this egregiously long video and you'd like to see some more Stellaris content possibly you'd like to find out how you can use Galactic Paragons to absolutely ruffle stomp your opponents with some ridiculous leader traits click the video on screen now

Channel: Montu Plays

Views: 40,709

Keywords: Stellaris, stellaris gameplay, montu plays, montu plays stellaris, stellaris lithoids, stellaris 3.9, stellaris 3.9 release date, stellaris psionic, stellaris ascension

Id: 1WD5Q2CNYz4

Length: 34min 53sec (2093 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2023