Also they are giving away a portrait pack (includes the void portraits from pre-order bonuses, that hydra looking thing, and the dark xenomorph looking insectoid).
And they are having an anniversary sale on their own store, which gives steam keys last time I checked (bought Utopia from there, and it was redeemable).
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this yet but: it's in the Humble Monthly bundle.
I gave it a go and quite love it so far. Really good music, well polished, graphics are nice and clean and the atmosphere is wonderful. I'm still getting the hang of the most ideal way of playing but so far, it's fun.
Stellaris: Synthetic Dawn is a story pack for Paradox’s sci-fi Grand Strategy Game, providing an all-new way for players to establish their empire across the stars: as an entire civilization of artificial beings.
Stellaris players will have the option to start the game as a Machine Empire -- a society made up entirely of robots. Unique game features and event chains will allow the synths to expand as a robot hivemind, and create an AI-led network that grows to galactic dominance.
Features:
- You, Robot: Play Stellaris as a customized robotic civilization, complete with your own robot models and featuring robotic portraits, science robots, worker robots, and more
- AI, eh? Aye!: Follow new event chains and story features to lead your robotic hivemind to greatness as an intergalactic AI empire; establish Skynet in the skies
- Rise of the Machines: Oppressed synths may rebel against their masters and form new empires -- or you may even discover a fallen synthetic civilization among the stars
- Digital Enhancements: New synthetic race portraits, and expanded voice packs for VIR
Hmmm, if they keep to the story-pack pricing, I might buy this. Hiveminds without the possibility of making them synths was kinda dumb for them in Utopia.
Stellaris Dev Diary #92: FTL Rework and Galactic Terrain
Quote:
FTL Rework
The single biggest design issue we have had to tackle in the Stellaris team since release is the asymmetrical FTL. While it's a cool and interesting idea on paper, the honest truth is that the feature just does not fit well into the game in practice, and blocks numerous improvements on a myriad of other features such as warfare and exploration, as well as solutions to fundamental design problems like the weakness of static defenses. After a lot of debate among the designers, we finally decided that if we were ever going to be able to tackle these issues and turn Stellaris into a game with truly engrossing and interesting warfare, we would have to bite the bullet and take a controversial decision: Consolidating FTL from the current three types down into a primarily hyperlane-based game, with more advanced forms of FTL unlocked through technology.
[...]
Why Hyperlanes?
When discussing this, we essentially boiled down the consolidation into three possibilities: Hyperlanes only, Warp-only, and Warp+Hyperlanes. Wormhole is simply too different a FTL type to ever really work with the others, and not intuitive enough to work as the sole starting FTL for everyone playing the game. Keeping both Warp and Hyperlanes would be an improvement, but would still keep many of the issues we currently have in regards to user experience and fleet coordination. Warp-only was considered as an alternative, but ultimately Hyperlanes won out because of the possibilities it opens up for galactic geography, static defenses and enhancements to exploration.
Here are the some of the possibilities that consolidation of FTL into Hyperlanes creates for Stellaris:
- Unified distance, sensor and border systems that make sense for everyone (for example, cost of claiming a system not being based on euclidean distance but rather the actual distance for ships to travel there)
- Galactic 'geography', systems that are strategically and tactically important due to location and 'terrain' (more on this below) rather than just resources
- More possibilities for galaxy generation and exploration (for example, entire regions of space accessible only through a wormhole or a single guarded hyperlane, containing special locations and events to discover)
- Better performance through caching and unified code (Wormhole FTL in particular is a massive resource hog in the late game)
- Warfare with a distinct sense of 'theatres', advancing/retreating fronts and border skirmishes (more on this in future dev diaries)
If you don't care about mods at all then yeah, you can go ahead and pirate. To be able to access the modding section of PDX forums you need to have the legit copy of the base games - Valve doesn't give a shit if you pirate DLCs or not.
I think they're going to rework how war works, which is maybe one of the weaker parts of Stellaris. If they can get rid of deathballing then that'd be nice.
They are already doing that in a free patch (breaking up doomstacks, consolidating FTLs into hyperdrive with the others unlockable as tech, better defence stations, etc). At least that's the last I heard, it was a little while ago in a couple dev diaries.
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Black Friday can't come soon enough (who am I kdding, I'll prolly pirate it...)
