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[Draignean]

If folks are running a succession game, may I recommend two mods?

One which allows all crisis events to occur in a single game.
A second which lets the Scourge begin showing up much sooner than normal. I believe the first check takes place maybe 75 years into the game, rather than 120+ like in vanilla.

Those two should add plenty of fun.

Maybe it's my mods, but the Prethoryn pretty much end my games whenever they show up. One of my games I can fight them to a standstill, but that's it.

[Rolan7]

1. Get a couple meat world friends together.
2. Play race with democratic government.
3. Switch players every time a new leader is elected.
4. Complain bitterly about what a shitshow the old leader left you.

"This is a madhouse designed by madmen, each with a hatred for the previous one's specific brand of madness!"

Possibly the most famous succession game.

[PTTG??]

I started a thread for it.

[Cthulhu]

I'm playing a race of fast-breeding short-lived bird people in a militaristic tribal democracy.  Short lived is really irritating, my scientists don't live long enough to get 5 stars to research precursor artifacts.

[Dunamisdeos]

I'm playing a race of fast-breeding short-lived bird people in a militaristic tribal democracy.  Short lived is really irritating, my scientists don't live long enough to get 5 stars to research precursor artifacts.

This paid off for me when I got the techs to increase lifespan. I had better buffs from my traits late game.

[Teneb]

There was a dev diary

Spoiler: Mars Luxury Resort (click to show/hide)

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Now that the 1.7.2 update is out, we can officially start talking about the next update, which has been named 1.8 'Čapek'. This update will include the reworked AI crisis and other changes to crises outlined in Dev Diary #72. More information will be forthcoming in future dev diaries on the exact nature and release date of 1.8, but for today we'll be going over some changes and improvements to Habitability and Terraforming coming in 1.8.

Habitability Changes
Ever since the changes to the habitable planet classes and habitability back in Heinlein we have continued to discuss habitability, and in particular, the frequency of habitable worlds in the galaxy. A general feeling among the designers has been that habitable planets are too common and do not feel special enough, but that reducing the base number of habitable worlds wasn't really feasible while most empires only had access to colonizing a third of them at the start. We also felt that the sheer abundance of habitable worlds that become available to you when you do achieve the ability to colonize/terraform other climate types also meant that there is little pressure to expand your borders - not when you can triple your planet count simply by utilizing the planets already inside your borders.

For this reason we've decided to make a number of fundamental changes to habitability. First of all, the habitability at which Pops can live on a planet was reduced from 40% to 20%, meaning that by default, most species will be able to colonize most habitable worlds in the galaxy from the very start. We have also changed the actual effects of habitability: Rather than acting as a cap on happiness, it now acts as a modifier on it (in addition to affecting growth, as before), with each 10 points of habitability below 100% reducing happiness by 2.5% (so at the base 20% habitability, a Pop would get -20% to their happiness). This means that while low-habitability planets are possible to colonize, it may not be a good idea to do so unless you have ways to compensate for the negative effects of low habitability.


With these changes, we have cut the base number of habitable worlds in the galaxy in half. For those that prefer to play with more (or even fewer!) habitable worlds, there is of course the habitable worlds slider in galaxy setup as before. Overall, the changes should result in habitable worlds and terraforming candidates feeling like more significant finds in the early game, and contribute to mid and late game friction as empires run out of worlds to colonize inside their borders.


Planetary Deposits
Along with the change to habitability, we have also changed the way resource deposits are generated on habitable worlds. Rather than all habitable worlds having the exact same chance to generate the different kind of resource deposits, we have now broken it up a bit by climate as follows:


Wet Climate planets (Continental, Ocean, Tropical) are more likely to generate food and society research deposits.
Frozen Climate planets (Arctic, Tundra, Alpine) are more likely to generate mineral and engineering research deposits.
Dry Climate planets (Desert, Arid, Savanna) are more likely to generate energy and physics research deposits.
Gaia planets are more likely to generate mixed deposits and strategic resources.

Of course, this does not mean that you will *only* find those types of desposits on such planets - it simply means they are more likely to be found there.



Terraforming Interface Improvements
Also coming in 1.8 are a couple changes to improve Terraforming and Terraforming Candidates. First of all, we've introduced a concept called 'significant planetary modifiers'. This is a flag (accessible to modders) that can be set on any planetary modifier, and will result in that planet appearing in the Expansion Planner even if it not of a habitable planet class. For now, the only significant modifier is Terraforming Candidates (such as Mars), so you should no longer find a Terraforming Candidate only to forget which system it is located in, but we expect to make more use of this functionality in the future.


We also spent some time cleaning up the Terraforming interface in general, hiding the button for planets where it is never applicable (such as non-Terraforming Candidate barren worlds) and improving the sorting and style of the actual terraforming window.


That's all for now! Next week we'll be talking about some significant changes coming in the area of genetic modification.

[EnigmaticHat]

Wait... doesn't that mean your choice of species type is no longer cosmetic?  So a desert species is functionally different than an ocean one?

[USEC_OFFICER]

Vaguely? But now you can colonize everything off the bat and dump robots everywhere so I'm not sure how much it changes things. My guess is not by a lot, since happiness cap is no longer a thing and you can dump defensive armies everywhere to deal with unrest.

I want to say that these changes makes Extremely Adaptable overcosted. Before it was worth it so that you could colonize almost every single planet you encountered instead of waiting for techs or different pops or terraforming. I guess it still helps with colonizing planets with negative habitability but those are somewhat rare and regular Adaptable should work just as well. So in practice Extremely Adaptable may turn out to be just a +5% happiness boost and a bonus to growth which I don't have the energy to calculate. You can pick up Communal and Rapid Breeders at half the cost of Extremely adaptable and still have that happiness boost and some of the growth boost, hence why I think it's overpriced.

So I guess the question is whether the bonus to growth from Extremely Adaptable is high enough to justify its cost compared to Communal + Rapid Breeders. Especially since those two points could be dumped into something else. That would require calculating this shit out which is... Something I'll do tomorrow if nobody does so beforehand.

[Culise]

Wait... doesn't that mean your choice of species type is no longer cosmetic?  So a desert species is functionally different than an ocean one?

That was technically already true: different planet modifiers already apply to different biomes at different probabilities.  While this particular example was more important before the food rework, tropical worlds simply do not receive the Bleak (-5% habitability, -10% food) modifier, while tundra, arctic, and arid were more likely to receive it.  On the flip side, only the three Wet habitable types (Continental, Ocean, Tropical) received the Lush modifier (+10% habitability, +20% food).  Various other uninhabitable biomes also have their own particular modifiers, but those obviously aren't relevant due to being uninhabitable; by the time you could access them either via vanilla (Barren) or modded terraforming, the game had reached the state where your starting biome didn't really matter nearly as much.  At least, that was the case the last time the wiki was updated; I had to pull the specific examples from there because I couldn't recall them off the top of my head, which is rather telling regarding how significant the "difference" was. 

Still, it does seem to raise the question of whether it's OK to go further in this direction.  It does differentiate species a bit more and makes the choice of initial biome even more important, but that may not necessarily be to the better if it locks players in particular play directions due to limited bonuses.  I don't think it's a bad direction, per se, though, especially with the other changes that allow all species to at least settle all worlds from the start and alter the habitability from a hard cap on happiness to a soft modifier.  They may wish to change how expensive Adaptive/Extremely Adaptive are, though, depending on how playtesting shakes out. 

EDIT: Ah, USEC already touched on most of my second paragraph. ^_^

[Cthulhu]

I'm mostly playing this game to RP, not to optimize, so the changes sound pretty cool to me.

[USEC_OFFICER]

EDIT: Ah, USEC already touched on most of my second paragraph. ^_^

Yeah. Sorry about that. :v

Also I did the math on Adaptable/Extremely Adaptable and assuming that I understand how habitability affects pop growth, then it works like this:

The effect of (Extremely) Adaptable on pop growth depends on habitability. The closer habitability is to 100%, the larger the effect is. So the maximum amount of pop growth you're getting from Extremely Adaptable is 20%, for colonizing planets that are normally 80% habitability for your pop (ie. Not your homeworld but of the same climate). For just Adaptable it's 10%, at 90% habitability. Of course that's the best case scenario. For climates which are the same type (ie. 60% hab.) it's going to be 16.66% growth for EA and 6.66% for A. For climates of a different type (20% hab.) then the bonus is only 12.5% for EA and 5.88% and A. Of course growth is a slope for habs between these points things sharply drop off at 90~95% hab since the limit is 100% but that should give you a good idea of how Adaptable/Extremely Adaptable affects pop growth in the likely cases.

In other words, for 1 ninth of planet types, Extremely Adaptable is better than Rapid Breeders, slightly better for 2 ninths and worse for 2 thirds. On average it's a 14.26% to pop growth bonus which is honestly better than I expected, especially since moving pops from high-hab worlds to lower ones is always an option. But then that bonus starts dropping once habitability techs come in because that 20% drops to 15% and the other classes don't increase enough to fully compensate. For Adaptable the bonus to growth is only 6.51%.

So basically, in conclusion, I don't think that Adaptable/Extremely Adaptable are worth their cost with the new changes. On average, Extremely Adaptable is slightly worse than Communal + Rapid Breeders, while being twice the cost. It does let you colonize planets with habitability below 20% but that is definitely not worth 2 extra trait points, especially since its effects are significantly reduced with planets at 85% hab or above, which could easily be a third or more of them when you get all of the hab techs and fill out your Tradition tree. Adaptable gives half the bonus of Communal and 43% of Rapid breeders despite being the same cost. And again it exceeds in some edge cases and suffers in others, which makes me wary about its 2 trait point cost as well. However you could probably justify it a touch more than Extremely Adaptable.

tl;dr: Adaptable/Extremely Adaptable are not worth their costs with these changes. They should probably be bumped down in cost by 1 point or somehow reworked to justify their shit.

[Sirus]

I'm guessing they will indeed be reworked.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Oh. And I just realized that, unless I'm forgetting something important or shit changes, Extremely Adaptable should let you colonize Tomb Worlds right off the bat now, since they start at 0% hab and you only need 20% to colonize planets. Which is... Not the best thing, since Spiritualist pops will get pissy and Spiritualist FEs will get super pissy. But, you know, it's a thing you can do now.

[Cthulhu]

My new game is militarist egalitarian xenophiles.  We world galaxy police now.  You're gonna be free or else

[GiglameshDespair]

So hive minds can inhabit every standard planet time without penalty from the very start?
Well, I suppose they needed some kind of boost.