[Dev Team] 3.0.2 Hot Fix Released (Checksum 91c1)

Obidobi said:

Hello everyone!

We hope all of you are enjoying Nemesis, a lot of work went into this patch and expansion. Countless hours to bring you what is, in my personal opinion, one of the best and most stable releases in Stellaris history! However, regardless of how much effort you put into something being flawless, there will always be some small cracks that get missed.

With this hotfix we hope to bring you a quicker patch of some of those larger cracks. This is intentionally a very small patch to make sure that we could get these specific issues fixed and delivered to you all sooner rather than later. Rest assured though that we have another patch in the works, so please continue providing us with feedback and bug reports (over at the Bug Forum)!

Spoiler: 3.0.2 Hot Fix

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######################### VERSION 3.0.2 ###########################
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# Bugfixes
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* Fixed an issue with the Big Red Button achievement not triggering before the game ended.
* Fixed an issue where players couldn't play as the pre-scripted Human Empires.
* Fixed an issue with Criminal Syndicates branch offices producing super negative trade due to crime, then multiplying it because of crime.

Known Issue: The Branch Office Breakdown tooltip for Criminal Syndicates does not include their planetary bonuses. The final value displayed in the UI is correct however.

Before I leave you I want to address two other issues briefly. First, we've seen the reports about various graphical flickering issues, we're currently working on a fix for that but we couldn't get it into this specific hotfix. But we'll make sure to provide a fix for it as soon as we can!

Secondly, I want to briefly touch on an aspect of the big economic rework we’ve done to improve the game – including the pop growth rebalancing. Please continue to give us constructive feedback and keep your messages civil, but don't spam random threads with hateful comments. Those will not be tolerated. We are continuously collecting your feedback and it will help us make tweaks to these complex systems. We are planning to address some of the feedback in the upcoming Dev Diary scheduled for Thursday!

Note: The Patch has not been released on the Microsoft Store, we don't have an exact ETA for the release but we are working on making sure it gets into your hands as soon as possible.

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Love it! Any news on when we can expect the rest of the (new/significant) issues to be fixed or just in the coming weeks?

Any way for Rogue Servitors can get their Bio-domes to count as housing for their Bio-pops in the next patch?

With all the mod updating I have to do, I might see several minor patches released before I even play!

Will the Big Red Button achievement be triggered retroactively? I still have the savegame that I finished last night when it didn't trigger

Thanks for your continued hard work! Hopefully the more hot-headed critiques don't get to yall too much. This update added a ton of good stuff, and I'm certain the game will keep improving with every patch Ob

Obidobi said:

Secondly, I want to briefly touch on an aspect of the big economic rework we’ve done to improve the game – including the pop growth rebalancing. Please continue to give us constructive feedback and keep your messages civil, but don't spam random threads with hateful comments. Those will not be tolerated. We are continuously collecting your feedback and it will help us make tweaks to these complex systems. We are planning to address some of the feedback in the upcoming Dev Diary scheduled for Thursday!

Click to expand...

Really appreciate you addressing this and letting us know the team are taking feedback onboard.

Great work and looking forward to more!

Obidobi said:

Secondly, I want to briefly touch on an aspect of the big economic rework we’ve done to improve the game – including the pop growth rebalancing. Please continue to give us constructive feedback and keep your messages civil, but don't spam random threads with hateful comments.

Click to expand...

I like the rework of that, but I feel like it hits a little too fast/triggeres a little too early as it is now, which is (100+0,5*empire_population). Maybe if it were to be (100+0,25*empire population) it would be perfect.

Or if it were to be gated behind "milestones" as in:

- <100 population being normal 100

- 100-150 being (100+0,3*empire_population)

- 150-200 being (100+0,5*empire_population)

- >200 being (100+0,7*empire_population)

or something to that effect.

EvilCowman said:

Will the Big Red Button achievement be triggered retroactively? I still have the savegame that I finished last night when it didn't trigger

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Unfortunately no, and we apologise to those who had achievement runs ruined like this :C We got the fix out as fast as we reasonably could.

EvilCowman said:

Will the Big Red Button achievement be triggered retroactively? I still have the savegame that I finished last night when it didn't trigger

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When does this trigger as I'm still halfway through my crisis war? I also wish it warned you that you immediately get war declared upon you the moment you get to the top crisis tier! I wasn't anywhere near prepared!

MGSteve said:

When does this trigger as I'm still halfway through my crisis war? I also wish it warned you that you immediately get war declared upon you the moment you get to the top crisis tier! I wasn't anywhere near prepared!

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The achievement triggers once the final upgrade is built, so you should be fine as long as you make sure to download the update before continuing

Thanks >_< I like the update so far, I don't understand the sparse bad reviews i saw

Thank you for acknowledging the flicker issue and look forward to the fix when it does come.

The fix for criminal syndicates is very welcome

Thanks for the immediate help!

covya said:

The achievement triggers once the final upgrade is built, so you should be fine as long as you make sure to download the update before continuing

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Ah, the final upgrade to the not-dyson-sphere-but-won't-attempt-to-spell-it engine?

It will be interesting to hear what your conclusion on Thursday is.

Obidobi said:

Secondly, I want to briefly touch on an aspect of the big economic rework we’ve done to improve the game – including the pop growth rebalancing. Please continue to give us constructive feedback

Click to expand...

Just on this, I'm playing as the XT-Exterminators and managing a ME is still an absolute nightmare. The auto job allocation keeps giving jobs to everything but maintenance drones, plunging all my planets into low stability. I have to keep manually closing off every other job and manually release them over time as the planet builds more pops. I've not had issues so far with a humanoid playthrough I've started.

If you want some feedbacks, then here we go.

I will not complain about the new pop growth system. it still works perfectly, and the game is a little bit harder than before. IMO, Stellaris was so easy with the old pop system that it is only normal pops became harder and harder to get.
The nihilistic acquisition now get more sense.

During a 3.0.1 pacifist game, I managed to get get more than 1200 pops before 2400, which is enough to fill one Ecumenopolis, produce 8k science, produce almost 2k alloys, build fleets worthing several millions of fleet power, become the number one power of the entire galaxy, etc...

Still, it is not possible anymore to have 15k science and 2k alloys per month while having only 10 planets and a single ringworld by the year 2350. But I think it wasn't supposed to be possible from the beginning...

So, I think the economic update is great, and I also think people are complaining because the game is harder to handle. People have now to be more careful about their pops, because at some point it will be so long to get more pops that an Ecumenopolis can stay empty. But they can disable some jobs so pops auto resettle to the Ecumenopolis.

So now empires have only a few heavily populated planets full of specialists, and a big amount of low populated mining/farming planets, sending their new pops to the inner worlds. At least, this is how I make them running. And it's running well.

Also, there is a real issue I want to complain about. The AI on ensign can't handle his own empire.
I did only two games since the 3.0, but each time tons of little empires emerged from the starting ones. It was planets revolting. Why did they revolt ? Because the stability was extremely low everywhere. I am not sure exactly why, but either the AI can't manage the food production, or the AI can't manage the CGs production.
Hive Minds seems to do better, so I would bet on the CGs.

I am currently increasing the difficulty to Commodore to see if the stability and the resource production bonuses will help the AI to stay away from self destruction.

I hope my feedback will help you. You did a really nice update and a really nice DLC. Well done.

I've seen a lot of stuff written on the forums about the increasing cost per pop on an empire basis. I'm still at less than 400 pops myself, so it still hasn't gotten to full effect for me (I'm doing fine at the moment), but I can imagine what will happen at larger galaxies (such as if you get up to 1000s of pops through conquest/vassalization). I don't think the concept itself is a bad idea - it can represent a demographic transition in your society as it gets larger and more developed, or imply that pops are logarithmic in nature (or something similar). So I don't recommend scraping the system entirely - just perhaps it needs some fine-tuning.

Though I think robots in particular need an examination, as they don't get to benefit from logistic growth and fall badly behind.

I will say that I LOVE that you include the indicator of how long it will take the pop to finish growing. You could already infer this from the growth rates and the progress bar in the prior versions, but it makes it so much more convenient to do so now, allowing faster planning without needing to stop to make a calculation in one's head (even if its an admittedly easy calculation).

EDIT: I also am loving the extra envoys from Shared Destiny and Bureau of Espionage. They are really helping me run a diplomatic game.

EDIT: I will let you know how my experiences evolve as my pop numbers get bigger.