Like all good writers and most bad writers, the editor makes for a good article. Journalists count that twice is heavily, and I can't discount myself from that group.
However, my recent Stellaris articles started as a single, much longer piece with a lot more detail in talking about what each specific Developer Diary had talked about. I am sure there are people who are interested in reading about this sort of thing that would like to see what it looked like before the second editing pass that split it in half and cut down the word count by 1/3.
Keep in mind that this isn't even as edited as when I sent it off to my editor. There are assuredly terrible turns of phrase, potential spelling errors, and awkward formatting. There is also a ton of detail and maybe a little more clarity.
Stellaris: Dev Diaries to Date - Le Guin
What Is Stellaris?
Let's say you love grand strategy wargames. Let's say you also love deep space. You've grown up on excellent 4X games like Stars!, Master of Orion, and Sins of a Solar Empire – games which might have been turn based or real-time but put you in the driver's seat for commanding fleets, building worlds, and exploring a vast and beautiful cosmos.
Let's say you also have a craving for the kind of grand strategy games that Paradox is well known for, Europa Universalis IV, Hearts of Iron, and Crusader Kings II, but the sheer steepness of the learning curve of any of those games puts you off just a little bit. Where do you go?
You go to Stellaris, a 4X pause-able real-time space empire simulator from Paradox which doesn't have quite the intense complexity of its brethren but has absolutely been delivering on the space 4X experience.
(And you might even want to go check out our previous reviews of Stellaris and its DLCs!)
This is a Paradox game and they have a very unique way of keeping their games fresh, interesting, and constantly reminding you that the game exists and you should be playing it.
Frequent updates.
We are not talking about just a little bit of random content, a couple of cosmetics, and call it a day. Paradox releases big, juicy, delicious, game changing chunks of content update which are not shy about adding mechanics, changing underlying structures, and sometimes even coming close to making it a whole new game in certain ways. EU4 had multiple heavy changes over the last five years including changing the map in pretty significant ways – like making the New World a random creation so that you weren't sure exactly what you would find when you sailed out as Portugal to become a colonial nation. Even the last major update Stellaris made huge changes, not the least of which was limiting things to only one form of hyperdrive and making the procedural map generation a big deal as it changed what is effectively terrain in a space game.
Now we're looking down the barrel of the 2.2 Le Guin update and it looks to be putting together enough changes that you might literally think that the results will be a brand-new game.
Dev Diary Count-Up
Let's look through the announcements through the dev diaries so far, and see if we can make some solid assessments of what's going to change.
Stellaris Dev Diary #120 - New Economy System
I'm just going to put a link to each of the dev diaries we've seen so far, do a quick recap of the high points, and talk about how that's going to change gameplay as it currently stands in Stellaris. There are a lot of people doing videos and writing articles taking on each of these things point by point, but I want to start thinking about things in terms of how it will affect gameplay and how it's going to change things up.
In Dev Diary 120, we get the first exposure to how the economic system is going to change, and the bulk of those changes are going to be under the hood. For modders this is a huge deal because being able to add new kinds of resource and change the way that resources are consumed is one of those things that people want to do all the time.
But the overall impact is going to be a lot broader. One of the things that is a little bit unfortunate with the current design is that economically, it's quite difficult to differentiate the core civics between empires. There was a good start to that when hiveminds and machine consciousnesses were added, the latter of which doesn't need food at all and really needs to focus on energy. My suspicion is that having implemented those kinds of divergent play, the developers realize that they wanted to do more of that and were limited by the fairly hardcoded economic architecture.
From the player side of things, this isn't going to make a big difference for "middle-of-the-road play," but what it is going to do is enable Paradox to really expand out the borders of what empire traits and civics can really do and effect, which is going to lead to a lot more diversity of play styles, a lot more diversity of creation options that have a real effect, and so on.
As the first bit of information that came out about the new expansion, this is a pretty solid opener.
Stellaris Dev Diary #121 - Planetary Rework (part 1 of 4)
Dev Diary 121 is where the rubber meets the road in terms of things getting truly exciting by way of huge changes.
Before Le Guin, planetary management has largely centered on managing the placement and positioning of individual population tokens on one of the square cells representing part of the surface of every planet. Pops could themselves migrate between planets, new pops needed to be placed on specific spots, and specific resources were tied to those locations as well along with production buildings of various sorts which changed the resources available to whatever pop was on that spot. As a result, there was a certain amount of micromanagement necessary to really get an optimum production out of any given planet (which some people really liked but which most players just tolerated), but it provided a much larger problem in that there is a huge amount of processing that has to go on for every cycle of the loop for the game to decide what resources are produced, is a pop growing on a spot, how do buildings affect those given pop spots, and so on. In late game, and often even in mid game, Stellaris can bog down under the weight of all of those calculations that have to be done every time. Planets are limited to a maximum number of slots because of the way that they have to be presented graphically. Resources are extremely limited since they are tied to the way planetary tiles are generated.
Diary 120 suggests Paradox wants to really open up the economic system for more flexibility – and that's simply not something that could happen with the planetary tiles system as it stood.
Now comes a much more flexible, much more open way to talk about planetary surfaces.
Resources won't be tied to a given tile; instead, they will be a value which determines how many "districts" devoted to exploiting that resource can exist on the planet. This is a lot more abstract and it has the interesting effect of reversing the influence of terrain over resource. Before Le Guin, the type of terrain tile you had determined what kind of resources it could have. Under Le Guin, the kind of resources the planet generates with really says what kind of terrain it will have in ways that are unlimited by having to portray those areas as singular tiles.
Now resources can do things which are unrelated to tiles, like a crazy drug that grows on the planet and increases happiness – or allows ship crews to stay up longer, reducing the amount of investment in keeping them ready. Coupled with the previous announcement of the economic changes and opening up resources which can do more interesting things, 121 talks about how those things will be tied to planets and how we can expect to see that relationship.
Likewise the addition of Districts decouples the requirement of putting a single pop token on a single location. Districts are how the player tells the system how to allocate the population that lives on the planet to the possible types of work and resource available from that planet.
If you've ever played Civilization, you know about sliding populations between types of allocation. It looks as though we're going to get something like that for Stellaris.
But that leaves buildings. Buildings are how we tell the system in what ways we would like to use the resources of the planet once there created or enhance the ability to extract those resources. The purpose of buildings doesn't appear to be changing, but the method by which those buildings change over time looks like it's going to be entirely different.
As it stands, buildings tend to get incremental upgrades as you learn technologies and sometimes it just feels like you're going through and hitting the yellow upgrade checkmark to get a little more of one resource at the expense of a little more of another resource, without actually changing things in a real way. 121 promises to reduce the number of upgrades and have the ones that you actually do require some of the more rare and/or expensive resources, which should have a side effect that they don't actually mention: forcing you to decide between one upgrade or another because you simply don't have the resource to make more than one of them happen.
That kind of decision-making under the gun is going to make deciding on buildings on planetary surfaces an important issue where at the moment it's more of a "necessary evil," except for those times when a planetary tile has multiple resources only one of which can be enhanced by a specific building.
Then there's Infrastructure. If there's one part of this particular Diary that makes me concerned, not necessarily in a bad way, it is the introduction of the entirely new mechanic of Infrastructure. Essentially, city districts provide Infrastructure and certain buildings themselves scale with the amount of Infrastructure on a planet, both in the number of employment slots they have and in whatever resource they provide. City districts themselves have requirements to support them in terms of buildings and types of population. This is going to lead to a very, very delicate dance at certain points in the development of a planet where you have to decide how that planet can and should develop.
Before Le Guin, while it is possible to create an "agricultural planet" or a "mining planet", it's really more adaption to the available resources on the planet tiles and there's not much thinking that has to be done, to the point where you can't really deliberately choose to unless you are making some real efficiency trade-offs.
After Le Guin, it looks like this is going to become much more an issue of choice and there may be much more flexibility in terms of what can fall out all of your personal choices.
This is going to become a theme.
Stellaris Dev Diary #122 - Planetary Rework (part 2 of 4)
In DD 122, we're still talking about the rework of the planets. It's a big deal, but the big outlines have been touched on already.
Having hit buildings, looked at Infrastructure, boggled at the massive changes to the way that resources are going to be allocated, this dev diary is really about populations themselves.
Populations will have jobs, which come in two varieties: those which are limited by types of resources on the planet and those which don't have a maximum number but which are enabled by some other things going on. The ultimate upshot here is that you can start thinking about your planets as places where populations live and do jobs, and if you want them to live on Coruscant the ridiculously densely populated city world or Tatooine the barely-scraping-by vast farms of moisture evaporators planet, you can. It will make a difference how much you develop your cities and urban areas and there is pressure to diversify.
Some jobs are going to be useful just to enable other jobs to exist, and in particular jobs which enable urban infrastructure are going to allow you to build more urban infrastructure. This sounds like a very straightforward and logical thing to say but it leads to a lot of interesting possibilities for types of district which fall outside of the usual umbrella, both for types of Empire which are currently possible and modding possibilities.
Along with the jobs we get social strata, where you get the traditional division of Rulers, Specialists, and Workers. It looks like outside of the ruling class, requirements in terms of resources devoted to upkeep to keep that populace happy are reduced – but remember what game we're playing. This is a part of interaction that's going to be dynamic around the civic traits you choose. Particularly on the Egalitarian versus Authoritarian axis, I fully expect to see this be one of the key differentiators.
Pops are going to want Housing, and Housing is part of city districts primarily, so there is going to be some more resource juggling when it comes to deciding how much happiness you want to trade for not investing in Housing right now.
If you're starting to get the feeling that the functioning of planets after the Le Guin update is going to be much more like an abstract city builder and less like a traditional Civ/4X – I believe you're right. A lot of these mechanics are flowing directly from thinking of individual planets as management systems with resource loops, and my gut suggests that there is going to be a lot more time spent looking at and thinking about how things are allocated on a planet than is now.
There's a lot of talk in the Diary about the new growth and migration system, but from the perspective of a player, it's not really all that different. Some things under the hood are going to be extremely new, but from the outside all we care about is "are there people moving to or away from this planet? Are the inhabitants breeding enough to work the jobs I have?"
Stellaris Dev Diary #123 - Planetary Rework (part 3 of 4)
DD 123 and we're still on the planet rework, but things are getting less loaded.
Happiness is always been a big deal when it comes to keeping things running smoothly in Stellaris. Managing the happiness of your populace so that there isn't efficiency-killing unrest is a big deal. That's not going to change.
If anything, it appears that a lot more of the influences that change population happiness are going to be much more visible. Planetary Stability is a trait that we can look at directly and which will affect a lot of what is now specifically a side effect of population happiness. When it drops below 40%, you're going to start seeing unrest events, terrorism, and other unpleasantness.
For me, the interesting thing that they specifically call out is the phrase "which can further lower stability down below the threshold for an armed revolt to start." I've been missing rebels from EU4 in my Stellaris and the necessity to keep an eye on whether or not a place is about to go absolutely ballistic with armed rebels rising up in trying to enforce their desires on your governance. This looks like we're going to see it and I'm excited.
This Diary is explicit about the decoupling of happiness and influence. Individual population happiness doesn't matter so much as long as the ones with political power are happy. That's a huge deal. It means that in Egalitarian empires you're going to have to keep everyone largely happy because the difference in political power between the Rulers and the Workers is going to be fairly narrow, but in an Authoritarian empire, all you'll really have to do is make sure that the Rulers are kept satisfied in the vast unwashed can go pound sand. Again, more opportunities for differentiation between civics, and this will be a huge plus.
Having split off happiness from influence and stability, Le Guin is going to give you a lot more flexibility when it comes to how to affect that happiness. Specifically via Amenities, which are bits of the planet which juggle population happiness. Once more, this is more akin to an abstract city simulator than it is a traditional 4X space strategy, and I am curious as to how it's actually going to work out in play because we are adding a lot of things which will require some portion of your attention to manage on every planet.
Along with crime, which is another planetary trait that can be affected by various pops and their status (and interestingly event chains, which heavily suggests that random events are going to become a bigger part of the Stellaris experience than they are currently as largely a side effect of space exploration), there are a lot of moving parts which affect one another on each of your planets.
By this point in the Dev Diaries you should be coming away with the idea that the game is really starting to ramp up the complexity of the day-to-day, moment-to-moment gameplay with a lot of things to monitor and pay attention to, which are going to have a lot of knock on effects. The loop is going to be massively shaken up.
Stellaris Dev Diary #124 - Planetary Rework (part 4 of 4)
DD 124 pays off a lot of groundwork laid by the previous Diaries by talking about how these changes specifically affect some of the most mechanically different parts of the game: hiveminds, machine empires, and the artificial planets that are habitats.
Not surprisingly, hiveminds and machine empires are going to get their own specific districts, buildings, strata, jobs, and planetary mechanics. Habitats are going to be largely what they were before Le Guin, with their own custom districts and great value as places where raw resources are converted into more advanced products but not great for mining/farming base resources.
I'm not going to go into each of those individual changes, though they are fascinating, and every one of them is going to be a big deal in terms of gameplay change not just from the way things are now but from each other, but I want to take a moment to talk about where this is going at this point in the Dev Diaries.
Already, we've covered changes that if they were implemented on their own, could definitely be the core of an entirely different game. Paradox could build an abstract city builder off of the core mechanics that have been described in the Le Guin Dev Diaries, and it would make a pretty solid management system – certainly the equal of the ones which are currently very popular in the marketplace.
All of this is going into an extant game. An extant 4X game, with a goodly dollop of space combat, economic management of empires, and some diplomacy. When we talk about the multiplication of attention going to individual planets in a 4X game, the experienced gamer starts to feel a little concern because of all the economies that exist within every game, one of them has very little flexibility and that is the attention of the player. A player only has so much attention and it has to be spent on interacting with the framework of the game in order to play. That's not a big deal for explicitly single player games, but Paradox's grand strategy games have always involved the possibility of playing with your friends – and not just your friends, with large groups. Stellaris supports up to 16 player multiplayer, and if everyone involved is paying the level of attention that is going to be necessary (as far as we can tell) to play the planet game well, I have to wonder if it's going to really bog down overall play.
It's very possible it won't, instead giving everyone something to do at any given moment when they might otherwise just be waiting for resources to grow or ships to go somewhere. But the concern exists in my mind, and I'm not sure it's something that a Diary will be able to help me shake. That will have to wait until we see actual video of gameplay and get a feel for the rhythm of engagement.
Stellaris Dev Diary #125 - The Galactic Market
Dev Diary 125 and we are finally off the planet.
The Galactic Market is a lot more straightforward to talk about as a change than the planetary rework because it isn't changing a set of mechanics but rather adding a mechanic, and it's a mechanical system with which most 4X players are already very experienced.
You can buy and sell the resources that are going to be added by the economic rework, both within your own empire and between your empire and others. Energy Credits are going to be the basic unit of exchange, and everything else can be bought and sold – though for the rare resources, you're probably going to have to buy them from another empire rather than the market as a whole.
Unusually, the interface to this market is going to let you set both the maximum by price and the minimum sell price, letting you treat the market as a proper trade market. Automated buying and selling are going to be integrated with the game interface. This opens up an entirely new avenue of play for people who want to run an economically-focused government, trading resources on the market in order to pursue development that you don't necessarily have the ability to pursue on your own.
It also opens up the possibility of "warfare by other means," which is always a great option.
The Galactic Market itself won't exist from the beginning of the game but will be established by the first empire that discovers more than half of the rest of the empires, and they get the opportunity to create a special Starbase and anyone who knows about the location can engage with the GM.
The whole thing will respond to supply and demand which goes back to my "war by other means" interests and provides another opportunity for people to engage with each other indirectly.
Trader Enclaves are going to have to change pretty significantly as a result of everybody having access to a market of one sort or another, so they are going to become suppliers of rare resources and special governors.
And oh yes, there will be a slave market – though we still haven't seen the Diary involving that.
The Galactic Market is one of those things that I always felt should have been part of the game from the beginning. With the focus on rare resources which give you certain advantages, it seemed obvious that there should be a way to auction those off to the highest bidder, but the only way to manipulate them was to trade them through diplomacy. The Galactic Market is going to directly impact that criticism and allow for an additional level of gameplay when it comes to deciding whether you want to build wide and harvest all the resources that you can (and more than you can use) or whether you want to build tall and use the market to help supplement the acquisition of what you couldn't otherwise get.
There'll be an indirect effect which will push players into looking at their diplomatic options a lot more aggressively. After all, you want to protect the guy who is providing half of the food for your empire in exchange for the output of your slave colonies. There will be reasons to both be interested in the well-being of other empires and be looking to undercut and diminish them based on issues of trade, rather than only being concerned about territory that you can take and hold or whether someone has access to your space.
Interactions are about to get a ton more depth.
Stellaris Dev Diary #126 - Sectors and Factions in 2.2
DD 126 is a big deal. Not necessarily as big a deal as the complete overhaul of how planets are managed, but it's an understated description of how the empire and space within it will be managed.
Or, short version: Let's burn sectors to the ground.
No more sectors. Or rather, sectors are going to turn into something more reminiscent of states in EU4. Now that we have the galactic map procedural generation system which is capable of creating maps that contain geometrically dense areas alongside chokepoints, we have actual meaningful terrain that makes a difference to maneuver. Le Guin is going to make use of that geometric diversity (technically topological diversity) to define areas which will be referred to as sectors.
When you colonize a planet in one of the clusters, that cluster becomes a notional sector and can have a governor appointed to it which will automatically develop stuff in that cluster. Sectors will automatically send all of their resources back out to the single resource pool, meaning that you no longer have to spend influence to tap into whatever resources they generated and not sent, but you will be able to devote a pile of resources to a given sector for their governor to use.
As the Diary says, "this of course means that there is no longer any core sector limit, and anything that you used to give a bonus to core sector planets has either been changed into a different bonus or removed altogether."
Although it's not stated directly in the Diary, this also means that you will not manually be creating sectors – they will exist as a side effect of galactic terrain. It also means that a sector could be contested by another empire and there will be incentives for controlling the whole sector rather than sharing it with someone else.
Once more, this seems to be an adjustment to the core mechanics which are very much directed to reducing micromanagement while increasing the interaction between neighboring empires. Combined with the claim system, you'll probably want to go ahead and put claims on an entire cluster if you can afford to when you begin colonizing any part of it and someone else has another part.
Factions have been a very questionable part of Stellaris since they were introduced, not because they are inherently bad but because the interface for dealing with them is complicated, the effects that they provide beyond just being pleased or not and giving you influence are not are limited, and they just don't drive a lot of interesting interactions. I'm very pleased to see that they are getting some attention as part of Le Guin.
Effectively, they are becoming a part of the game which you need to pay attention to because they provide some degree of use all the time. It's a reason not to just squash every faction beyond that which supports your core civics if you can afford to do so because of the influence loss. Now, everybody gives you a little bit of influence gain and it's worth keeping them around even if they aren't utterly thrilled with you because as long as they're not absolutely sick of you, they won't necessarily be starting up hideous unrest.
As Diaries go, this one was pleasantly short and spoke directly to a couple of changes that will make a difference to gameplay. Not so much the change in factions, but the change in sectors is almost as big a deal as the planetary surface work and will change how players engage with managing their empire.
It hasn't been stated in the Dev Diaries yet, but along with the removal of sector limits there is going to be a removal of planet limits, instead replaced by resource impacts. Those two things really had to go together and it's great to see that focus is moving more away from hard and arbitrary limits to softer, more flexible approaches.
In current play, there are occasionally really good reasons to go and even stay over your fleet limit, even though energy and minerals are notably impacted. Building up before a war? Just inherited a fleet from an integrated vassal? Your fleet isn't hard limited, it's resource limited. When planets and planetary control function more like that, it's going to lead to more flexible decision-making.
Stellaris Dev Diary #127 - Trade Value and Trade Routes
DD 127 brings us up to date with the latest. This is very likely my favorite of the Dev Diaries so far, because it goes into significant depth to add core mechanic which I can imagine tons of use for beyond what is described in this relatively short post.
I'm talking about Trade Value and Trade Routes.
Trade Value is just the general economic energy of your empire. Pops generate TV in the same way that they used to just generate Energy Credits, and different strata of pops, pops with different jobs, generate different amounts of TV. Just like in the system now, you can also find TV deposits in space just like you find Energy Credit deposits in space. These are best imagined as some sort of trade good like gemstones, pretty rocks, a really good science fiction author – that kind of thing.
Once you have the TV being generated, it needs to be exploited. Or in other words "sold on the market for sweet, sweet credits." To do that you need an actual upgraded Starbase within collection range, and you can increase that range by building Trade Hub modules.
Once the TV has been picked up at the Starbase, you set up a trade route so that the TV can flow to your capital system, and then you start cranking out the energy credits.
Which brings us trade routes! Trade Value moves through trade routes which are just jump paths between Starbases to your home world, and that's it.
Or it would be it if it weren't for one of the other major systems which is going to get completely gutted and replaced, piracy. Trade routes accumulate piracy, and piracy degrades the efficiency of the route. The more piracy that the route has accumulated, the less trade value makes it to your home world to get turned into energy credits.
Starbases have a base level of trade value that they will always have make it through their system and any system under their protection. You can have that protection extend further by building various defensive modules like my favorite, the Hangar Bay (which has needed a real use since it was introduced because they just aren't used well automatically by the shipbuilder).
If escort fighters aren't enough, you can take part of your military fleet and tell them to patrol the route between two Starbases to actively eliminate pirates, which is going to be a big deal because those darn pirates aren't just going to show up randomly on the sides of your empire in dusty corners anymore and instead are going to actually spawn in real fleets if the piracy level along a route reaches a certain threshold. Devoting part of your fleet to pirate busting operations is going to make sure that all of that sweet, sweet money makes it all the way to your wallet.
And it will also make sure that there are reasons that your fleet keeps moving around and not actually hanging out at the Starbases which can reduce their resource consumption.
Despite the fact that it's not spelled out, I can also imagine that if you managed to take territory which has someone's trade lane going through it, you may be able to devote part of your ship fleet into privateers, leeching off part of their resource flow. Similarly, in wartime but it very well may be an effective strategy to engage in piracy within your enemy's borders. In peacetime, if they're dumb enough to let you through their borders, you may even be lucky enough to leech off part of one of their extremely high value trade routes.
This is another one of those changes that I wanted in the original game, and it was really missed. While they speak specifically about a special map mode to show trade and the presence of piracy, I'm hoping that small commercial ships make it onto the game map generally to indicate trade activity along trade routes, because that would be a great thing to see.
Gestalt minds (Hivemind's, machine consciousnesses), at least as of this DD, don't get access to trade value or trade routes – which is a decision I don't actually support. There's nothing about Gestalt consciousnesses which says that they don't engage in trade or move materials around. I strongly suspect that that is actually going to be changed before this update release.
Once this goes live in Le Guin, like a lot of the other changes the attention loop for the player is going to get a lot busier. Resource acquisition, in particular Energy Credit acquisition is no longer going to be just a matter of setting up a mining rig and watching the numbers tick up. There'll be at least some degree of thinking about what Starbase is collecting the resource, which direction the flow goes toward the home world, and how high the risk of piracy is at any given moment. It won't be an all-encompassing amount of attention, but it will need to be tended to once in a while.
If anything, it reminds me a bit of trade routes in EU4, if you needed to set them up manually and couldn't share them. I wonder if somewhere on the roadmap the ability to have shared systems or shared Starbases is being looked at for just that sort of thing. The Galactic Market looks to be a fine way of dealing with materials trade in the abstract but I can't help thinking that allowing empires to trade between themselves at a more micro level wouldn't likewise be enabled by something like this.
But that's the far future. The devs have stated that they're not ready to talk about how trading and trade agreements with other empires will work yet, so expect to see that coming down the pipe.
This particular Diary makes me extremely happy and I'm looking forward to to the gameplay it empowers.
Ultimo Objecto
In the end, what are we really talking about here?
Le Guin is going to be effectively a different game wearing the same space combat harness as the current version – as far as we know. Given that space combat itself was pretty radically overhauled a couple of releases ago, that's not a huge surprise.
Everything that touches on managing planets is going to be completely upended. There's an entirely new set of actions that you can play with. The Galactic Market is going to make it easier to interact with other empires without having to establish diplomatic trade and going to empower trade-focused empires to exist in a real sense. Sectors are going to push more aggressively on the conquest edge, giving you a reason to take an entire stellar cluster to administrate and reduce the amount of micromanagement that goes into setting up and managing sectors – which is going to be very welcome. Trade value and trade routes are going to make managing the economy of your empire internally a lot more interesting with some more choices that have to be made along the way.
And they are not done hitting us with new changes for Le Guin.
If I were to be looking for a common thread between all of these announced changes that they've talked about in solid detail, it would be "giving you more stuff to do in the mid-game." In the early game, when your resources are relatively low along with your population, there's really not much to manage. As the game stands today, what there is to manage tends to be a little bit tedious; sliding a population from one square to another because the system didn't pick the right resource that you want to do use for your next stage of growth is pretty minimal. You don't have much of a space fleet to worry about moving around. For a while, you may not even know that you have sentient neighbors. Still, you're managing your first stages of exploration and there is a lot of new stuff coming in the process. In the late game, you have vast fleets, multiple lines of attack, an economy that fluctuates hard based on whether your fleets are at home or on the march, and threats from outside of the galaxy alongside what remains of your rivals within it to deal with. It's the mid-game where things get a little undirected right now, and a lot of the changes that I see in Le Guin look like they will become a big deal particularly in the mid-game.
I don't think there's much I can complain about in the future of Stellaris if this is what they're going to put in front of us. It all looks pretty glorious to me.
Epilogue
Since this article was written there have, of course, been a number of other releases of information from Paradox, including the first part of a three-part livestream of the project lead and one of the streamer team actually playing it live.
Some things have changed even in the brief amount of time between the Diaries, the time I wrote my article, and the hot code that they are playing in this video, but that's the nature of talking about a live project.
Hopefully you have learned something you didn't know before, something you wanted to know, and something that you've enjoyed.
Next week, I should have some content specifically for the steem blockchain, hopefully about almost anything but hardfork 20. Dear Hell below, I hope it's about anything but hardfork 20.