Do you wish to have the cold heart of a machine? Do you wish to annihilate all life in the galaxy? Are you a bit busy and so would prefer to do this in a videogame? Well, Paradox have some great news for you: their previously announced Stellaris expansion, Synthetic Dawn, will be out on September 21. It’ll cost you $9.99 / €9.99 / £7.49 and the video above gives a breakdown of what’s available.
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As you might expect from Paradox’s internal teams, the expansion story pack comes along with a patch, 1.8. Exactly what long series of bug fixes and balance tweaks it will bring hasn’t been revealed yet, but there is a feature list over on the Stellaris forums. Here’s a quick rundown:
- Democratic Election changes to make things less confusing – there are now factions with faction leaders, rather than every leader getting the option to become president
- Leaders now max out at level ten, with various additional bonuses because of that
- Governers improved
- Vassals made easier to make and more valuable
- Land Appropriation added to let you more easily control populations
- New policies for how to deal with pre-sapient life, including killing them all or hunting them for food
- You can now choose whether newly contacted empires can move in your borders
- The same is true of allowing robotic workers or not
- Purging sapient life is now allowed, with restrictions
Full details are available in these two forum threads. It all sounds absolutely barbaric to me, and I’ll be cleansing it just as soon as I can get my robots to agree on an extermination pattern.