Stellaris grand strategy space game by Paradox discussy thingy thready thingy

Well that’s encouraging. But I don’t trust them, having heard similar in past updates. Will wait on the angry mob sentiment a few weeks after release…

Yeah, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Not that I think they’re being insincere, it’s just that this is an issue they’ve been battling a long time. The other PDS games don’t seem to suffer like this title does, so I have to think the codebase is difficult to work with as opposed to them just not caring. It wouldn’t surprise me given the major overhauls the game has received post-launch.

To be honest, it seems that the design ambitions got ahead of their skill and time to implement things. Not in the sense that they’re bad or lazy, but in the sense that it’s tricky problem that game developers aren’t used to solving.
The way the economy works makes it hard to have an heuristic (i.e. a quick good enough algorithm) for what the AI should do, which in turn led to the decision of having it always recheck what it’s doing (and job reallocation). This ended up making both bad, as the scripting language has limited tools due to performance concerns too.
Which should also be a lesson on why more detailed simulations are not necessarily better.

Best patch evah! Exaggerating, juuuust a little…

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-170-performance-and-other-technical-issues.1335134/&sdpDevPosts=1

(Should clarified that it’s a diary on performance improvements, because normal people don’t look at URLs)

The linked video shows them running about 3x faster in a very-high-pop, late-game environment. So that’s great. I’m uncertain how that will play out in game since they say it is only a 15-30% improvement on average. Clearly they have done a lot to address the processing overhead for pops.

Good news, hopefully modders can fix the rest of their design quagmire.

I like that dev’s writing style. Information salted with just the right amount of humor.

Great dev diary. I completely understand how they got to where they are performance-wise, but I do think it’s unacceptable for it to be left in such a state for so long. Not blaming the devs on that one, that call is usually made by the higher ups. Really glad they’ve responded to the backlash and took a few months to pound it back into shape.

I still wish they’d start clean with a Stellaris 2. They’ve learned a lot of over the course of the project and I feel like this franchise more than any other could use a rebuild from the ground up with a solid new foundation.

Yes, this. I worry higher ups will insist on squeezing DLC out for another 5 years before restarting with a better engine / design. This remains the game I most want to see done right… One day…

So today’s Dev Diary is that they’re doing a stream and will announce the release date for Federations.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-171-federations-stream.1341905/

They also write that the Dev Diary post will be updated with actual information later in the day.

Why do announcements of announcements bug me as much as they do? :) In this case I get it, at least. Just kind of a placeholder for the dev diary until it’s ready, so they didn’t have a thousand “Is there a dev diary today?” and “where is the dev diary?” posts. Still…

I completely agree. Ah, the information density of text, I wish that was still in vogue.

Yeah, but at least this one was only a few hours before, so most people don’t even notice.
Anywho, March 17th, 20€. On sale now, for insane people.

Because they’re annoying and pointless.
“Get hyped for the hype!”

Get hyped for a passable AI, to be improved a week later (sigh). Probably good enough at pretending for me, as it’s too much work to optimize it, but YMMV.
Regardless, it’s a much better better framework based on economic and military plans which get changed based on game status. On release, economic AI will be mostly based on the age of the game, with the AI attempting to reach certain surplus goals (including pop) globally (taking into account expected production at full employment, which isn’t perfect, but that would IMO be too much to ask) instead of a build order. Should be easy for them and modders to add more status flags, for example, for wars, mega-structures or ecumunopoli (yep, it doesn’t know how to build them yet).

Oh man I love the meme in that post.

Those AI upgrades sound very exciting. Hopefully the changes are very well received and improve the case for dedicating more resources to AI in the future (in Stellaris and other Paradox games - I’m looking at you, Hearts of Iron IV battle plan AI!).

I so want these changes (AI, performance) to work out. So badly. But, having been burnt a few times by hope at major updates, I’ll try to ignore all of this until I actually get a chance to play (the free patch).

I think that’s a very reasonable position to take, @AK_Icebear. I have a friend who loves Stellaris, so I’ll probably end up playing a game or two with him at least when the expansion rolls out. If no one else is taking the plunge I can be the guinea pig and report back. :)

I’ll buy the expansion because I must have all the things, though I will probably wait for the maintenance update to play, since time is so short.