Stellaris Dev Diary #423 - Stellar Cannon, Civics, and The Hyacinth Found

Hello, Stellaris Community!

Nomads releases on June 15th - less than two weeks from now - so I hope you’re planning your first playthroughs. Today we’re going to take a look at the Stellar Cannon, the new civics, and the prescripted empire we’re adding with Nomads. Iggy also has a little bonus with some species traits.

Let’s go!

Hello everyone, Gruntsatwork here to talk to you about our newest megastructure, the Stellar Cannon.

A purely offensive megastructure, buildable by Settled Empires as long as they have an available system with either a neutron star or a pulsar. It requires no Ascension to research either.

Once constructed, starting from level 1, its functionality remains roughly the same through all 3 levels. First, you prepare for Stellar Devastation.

Pushing this, unfortunately not red, button will move your into the galaxy view with a targeting reticle you might find familiar if you have used the Quantum Catapult before.

Then, all you need to do is target a system you find particularly bothersome.

Once the target has been confirmed, the Stellar Cannon will start its charge-up phase, opening a wormhole to the target and beginning the 140 day long countdown. During this time, you will be able to see a stunning visual effect in the target system.

If you wish for any of your ships in that system to survive, that's the moment to run. Or pray that your enemy is broke.

Let's talk about the math. How much does it cost to fire the Stellar Cannon?
Everything.

It uses up your entire energy stockpile and fires that at the enemy system. The conversion to damage scales with your Cannon level, with the first level giving you 1 damage for 100 energy spent.

Once the charge-phase is up, the damage is applied to every single ship in the system. In addition, it will also deal devastation to every colony in the system, scaling with the stellar cannon level, 10%, 25%, 50%.

Should your shot use more than 50000 energy, you will also increase the temperature of all planets in the system, moving them one step up the dryness scale like Barren to Molten or Arctic to Ocean. Mind you, this will not move a planet out of being habitable or into being habitable.

Shots fired at this level will also trigger being in breach with the Terraforming resolutions of the Galactic Community. Long Range Terraforming is still Terraforming.

Now, obviously, being shot at will trigger opinion penalties with the shooter and give you an alert, just in case you missed being shot. In addition, using the Stellar Cannon will carry smaller penalties with everyone, because actually using it is kinda terrifying to the rest of the galaxy.

Now let us talk about restrictions. The Stellar Cannon’s main restriction is its inability to target systems with your own colonies in them. While it has a significant charge up phase, it has only a small cooldown between shots, because it uses up all of your energy. You are however free to acquire more energy to fire again. I would suggest asking your local megacorp for a loan for the purpose of high-intensity Terraforming.

In addition, the AI has a few more restrictions, in that it will only target enemies if it has more than 10000 energy in storage, has a positive energy balance and will only target systems with fleets that have more that piddling fleetpower, mainly so they won’t waste their entire energy budget on shooting single ship reinforcements.

It will also be more likely to target you if you insult it, especially if your insult is extra creative.

Hey everyone, Cosmogone again, here to show you around the new civics coming with the DLC.

Let’s start with the simpler ones:

These civics are pretty straightforward, and give you some modifiers to bolster a playstyle or roleplaying fantasy.

Caravan Masters, Flight Schools, and Hired Guns are available for both regular and corporate nomad empires, while Deep Sleep has versions for all nomad empires.

Star Seekers looks more closely at the cultural impact of being a traveling civilization, and will encourage you to travel around while gathering supplies, before triggering an up to 6 month long celebration across your Arkships, burning all your hoard in joyful revels.

A festival will quickly deplete your Operational Reserve, so make sure that you have the means to fill it back up afterwards. It will immobilize one of your arkships, as you encamp for the duration of the festivities, letting your people spread through the system.

Void Reavers is the Nomads take on the pirate fantasy, and leaves you free to play it subversively or more directly, by either leeching off resources through your waystations, or straight up bombarding colonies to plunder them. It is only available to regular empires.

The Pirate Hideout will be the cornerstone of your operations, silently siphoning off a small fraction of the resources produced from any colony in the system. Though discreet, this will of course not be tolerated for long by your victims, so take good care of keeping your stations concealed if you wish to avoid war… for now.

The Reaver Stronghold is meant to be the hidden heart of your pirate dominion. Harder to keep secret, it will fortify your station, and double the efficiency of your hideouts. I personally like to build them tucked away in remote nebulas.

Finally, the more direct approach of mugging your neighbors out of their lunches can be achieved through the Plundering bombardment stance, which will let you squeeze every last morsel of valuable resources out of juicy planets. While it won’t be much out of backwater colonies, it should prove substantial if you can manage to hit a capital or better, an ecumenopolis.

Hey all, Iggy here! One thing we have seen in a lot of science fiction over the years is species moving to Zero-G or reduced gravity housing fundamentally changing compared to their original species, and that was a fantasy we decided to explore in Nomads. That’s right, actual secret buff to Evolutionary Predators, new species traits!

Blorg-El was born under a brown dwarf, only after flying to a pulsar was their true potential unlocked​

Any of the traits explicitly mentioning Arkships are only available to species with the Arkship Habitability. Many of the other traits, such as Reaver and Photoadaptive, are available to all. In addition there are Machine variants of most of these traits.

If there is anything we can learn from looking around in Sci-Fi it’s that Nomads often want to go somewhere, and when they get there they want to stay. As the premier enabler of your Science Fiction fantasies we here in Studio Green will let you Settle and Embark!

Touchdown!​

We filled the Databank with multiple new entries for Nomadic gameplay, so that seems like a great way to start. As mentioned there, if you wish to Settle you should look to your traditions. After finishing Adaptability or Versatility, you can settle, as long as you have found an empty planet. Is that planet already occupied? Simply dislodge them with the war system mentioned in the last Dev Diary.

Mareid will be nice eventually. We hope.​

As a settling Nomad you will have up to 3 options:

• Settle with this Arkship, leaving the rest of the ships to a Subject

• Settle with all the Arkships, putting all the pops in one place

• Stay in space, while this Arkship Settles and becomes a Settled Subject

Now from the other perspective things are quite similar!

It’s pricey to Embark!​

Embarking costs the same as building an Arkship and it has very similar logic to Settling.

The Databank is Love.​

Same logic here:

• If you have a single planet, you become Nomadic and all your existing starbases become Waystations.

• If you have multiple planets, you leave behind a Vassal or the Nomad is the vassal.

And yes. This is the perfect solution for Doomsday Empires.

Run awayyy!​

Greetings people of Earth! Over a century ago, you launched the Ulysses Initiative, a grand project in which you sent 1.5 million people into space aboard multiple Arkships. We of the Hyacinth were scattered away from our sister ships, and only thanks to the great leadership of the great Captain Gundersen did we survive. We now fly through the stars under Arch-Surveyor Bjørn Gundersen's guidance.

Eaten by cannibals? What nonsense are you talking about?​

You have produced scientists and explorers willing to build and crew Arkships before, and we suspect you still do. The doors of our Society are open to anyone who still carries that spirit and wishes to explore the galaxy with us. Now we must leave, for we have discovered Clues of the Chrysanthemum.

Unity calls.​

The Gundersen Research Society is a Materialistic, Xenophilic, Authoritarian empire. In that order. They respect and treasure knowledge above all else, they don’t care where this knowledge comes from as long as the discoverer acknowledges the Gundersen line. I hope you enjoy having a new humanity added to the games canon, even if it’s more of a ‘what if’ situation here.

Alfray checking in to report on the progress of our research into the Exodus Jump Coordinator. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, it’s limited to the gravity well of our galaxy and cannot escape it (but maybe one day…)

Where we’re going we won’t need roads hyperlanes…

Much like the Quantum Catapult, the Exodus Jump isn’t the most precise method of travel (though any modifiers that apply to Quantum Catapults will apply to the Exodus Jump as well).

For those of you with Astral Planes, this includes the Astral Calibration action.

Unlike other forms of point-to-point FTL travel, the space-time tear caused by the Exodus Jump is a tad untamed.

Maybe jumping into the Sol system as a test flight was a bad idea…

​

We’re almost done!

Next week will be the preliminary release notes for the 4.4 ‘Pegasus’ update and Nomads, and we’ll be revealing our last spinal mount.

See you then!