A hotfix is inbound for Stellaris following the launch of the space 4X game’s latest expansion, Overlord. The hotfix is aimed at fixing several important bugs that have popped up since Overlord arrived, which Stellaris’ game director says are, in several cases, the result of rushing to include several last-minute changes prior to launch.
“It’s a pretty long list for a hotfix, and to be completely honest, that’s my fault,” writes game director Stephen Muray in a post to the Paradox forums today. “In our eagerness to get Overlord out to you in the best shape possible, I approved several changes and additions at the last minute that I really shouldn’t have. Some of the threads have mentioned that we have some bugs in the launch version that weren’t in the prerelease streams – that’s completely accurate.”
Muray says one example of this was in the way that the AI handles tithes and subsidies. The team had identified an exploit involving this system, and made a change on ‘code freeze day’ – when no further updates are supposed to be made – in order to close the loophole.
“I should have let the exploit ship, known-issued it, and given the change a proper QA and balance pass rather than rushing it in,” Muray writes. “I’ll do so in the future.”
The hotfix, which Muray says will roll out “as quickly as we reasonably can”, will make the AI more likely to accept harsher tithes and subsidies, rebalance trade weights for specialist subject leaders, and prevent subjects from being able to get their overlord to declare war against themselves, among other fixes.
Trade deals and revolts will no longer start and then immediately cancel – the Stellaris team says the hotfix will make it so that revolts will only begin if the planet has the theoretical ability to succeed in a revolt.
Muray says the goal for the Stellaris team right now is to make Overlord “the best Stellaris expansion since Utopia.”