Update May 26, 2016: Clarke is now available in beta form, as are the full patch notes for the update.
Stellaris’ first major update, Clarke, is just days away from official release. Before that, Paradox have made a beta version of the patch available to everyone, through Steam’s official Beta feature. This comes with the release of the full patch notes.
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If you want access to it, navigate to the Stellaris entry in your Steam list, right click and go to properties. Hit the betas tab and select 1.1.0_beta. Stellaris should then begin downloading an update. If it doesn’t, or you can’t see that beta entry in the dropdown list, restart Steam and it should be fixed.
The full patch notes are over on the official Paradox forums. There’s significant additions from the preview highlights given out yesterday, so do have a check if you’re interested in the nitty-gritty numbers of it all, or precise bug fixes.
Original story May 25, 2016:Stellaris’ first major patch, Clarke, is just around the corner. After Paradox revealed all of their future plans last week, they’ve now laid out the highlights that Clarke will contain, including UI and AI improvements at the fore, as well as some small balance tweaks.
Here’s what’s changing:
- UI
- Sectors can now be managed directly from the outliner.
- Diplomatic Notifications are now much more detailed.
- End of Combat interface has received a major face-lift.
- Habitability icons/tooltips now show you more detailed information, including which worlds in a system you can currently colonize.
- AI
- Greatly improved sector AI handling of pops, buildings, spaceports and mining stations.
- Fixes for AI in end game crises.
- Improvements and fixes to AI handling of its fleets.
- Less restrictions on what the AI will trade and with who, especially in regards to border access.
- In multiplayer, empires that are player-controlled will have a ‘limited’ AI for a period of 10 years if the player drops. The limited AI will not make any drastic changes to the empire, such as changing sectors, disbanding ships, declaring wars, etc, allowing a player to rejoin their empire pretty much as they left it.
- AI aggressiveness can now be set as part of generating a new galaxy.
- Empire Builder
- Biographies added, letting you write a backstory and description of your species and empire. They’re shown on mouse-over in-game.
- Ruler titles can be customised to give more personality – Paradox’s example was CEO and COO rather than King and Prince.
- Balance
- War score costs now scale to the size of your target, so you can take more planets from large empires but can’t vassalize them in a single war.
- The ability to stack evasion on Corvettes was nerfed.
- Strike craft had their range substantially increased.
- Ethics were rebalanced to make Xenophile/Xenophobe stronger picks, among other changes.
- It is no longer necessary to control planets to demand them in war, but controlling planets that are set as wargoals are now worth more warscore.
- Technology cost is now increased both by number of planets owned and size of population, instead of just population. Accordingly, the tech increase cost from population was lowered.
- Bug fixes
- Military Station maintenance is now correctly calculated (was far too high previously).
- Numerous fixes to events, including fixing up the Old Gods event chain.
- Fixed ‘ghost’ trade deal entries and trade deals silently failing when you traded above a certain percentage of your resource stockpiles.
- Democracies that don’t allow slavery will no longer get the Slaver mandate.
- Difficulty settings are now available in multiplayer setup.
Paradox say they’ll be working on the Asimov patch next, which has a large focus on new features and balancing. They’ll be using their usual dev diaries to show those off in the next few weeks. For Clarke, it will enter a public beta phase before the end of the week, and hopefully be released soon after. Some more details over in the patch post on their forums.