Hello everyone! It has been a while, indeed. I know I have been promising more frequent updates, but we have been all super busy just working non-stop on our next major patch. Its going to include a LOT of goodies, many of them I haven’t even mentioned on these developer diaries. A short list would include our promised economic overhaul, various improvements to early game balance, more fighters (with more variety and importance in battle), hero ships, better strategic resource management, streamlined building list, improved tech tree and better sorting of jobs. This is beyond the new ships, events, relics and megastructures that you can expect to see!
But today is more than just a quick overview of everything that is coming down the line. Today I want to talk about yet another significant change you can expect to see in the next patch – our move toward streamlining planet classes.
Our initial goal with planet classes has been similar to our approach to nearly everything in New Horizons – try to keep things as close as possible to canon, within the constraints of gameplay. That means we tried to simulate the Star Trek planetary designation system as close as we could.
It might not surprise you that the result never quite worked. Trek has never been very consistent when it came to planets. Almost every planet we saw in Trek ended up being an M-class, from sweltering Vulcan to icy Andor. Almost every planet had a breathable atmosphere as well, despite some of them being incredibly hostile, like Delphi Ardu IV.
This is of course a problem when you are trying to convert that into Stellaris and the habitability ratings. Both Andorians and Vulcans could live on Earth quite comfortably on Trek… which clearly won’t work under Stellaris, where they each have a complete opposite climate they prefer to live on. Not to mention the number of habitable planets, and the overall impact on performance, that would happen if we did introduce the number of M-class planets that existed in Trek into our map…
Simply put, in Trek, considerations like habitability seems not to matter, and everyone could live everywhere. On the other hand, Trek comes saddled with a huge range of different planet classes that are, in fact, habitable, like O, P, Q, L and R, and with the various sub-types, habitats, unique planets, and such, we ended up with a bloated planet list, complex list of habitably traits. Just take a look at our current habitability trait list. Some species have over thirty entries in the list! Who can remember all of that, or even more importantly, make interesting choices on which planet to colonize or terraform?
Everything just became convoluted. Everyone can terraform all planets, can colonize all planets, and eventually you had enough pops from different species you can simply pick and choose the optimal species to colonize every habitable planet. No interesting choices… and a lack of interesting choices is boring… and in this case, even dangerous to performance (since pops, and colonizable planets, remain the biggest performance impact to the game).
Not to mention, it certainly made it clear we can’t add more planet classes… which is a shame, since all this time our good friends in Planet Diversity and Real Space have created wonderful new planet classes, such as arboreal, Mitterrandian and many more. We wanted to use these planet classes and their art, their planetary textures and portraits, to add more diversity to New Horizons… after all, isn’t the entire idea of Trek to explore new worlds? Don’t we want to have as many exotic new worlds as possible?
A solution presented itself with a recent development in Real Space. It seems one can use modifiers to change a planet visual while retaining the same planet class. With that, an idea was born.
Streamlining planet classes
The next overhaul is going to do away with a huge chunk of our existing planet classes.
Don’t worry, they will still be there, in term of visuals, diversity and content… but for all gameplay purposes, in the next overhaul, all species (with a few small exceptions) will have one of three preferable climates (and corresponding planet classes) – wet, hot or cold. So, there will be just three major planet classes, and your habitability traits, as you can expect, would have FAR fewer entries.
So, for example, instead of having O class planets, and M (alpine), M (Swamp), M (tropical) and so on, there will be one planet class encompassing all of them. As we expect from Trek where species comfortably lived everywhere, a species with a ‘wet’ climate preference could live on all those planets with equal ease… while not taking away from the game by removing content.
By using planetary modifiers, we can ensure that players will still encounter all those planetary types… and even add a whole lot more. All while keeping the list of planet classes and habitability tiers tight and clear. You will always know exactly which species will do well on what planet.
Terraforming choices
Terraforming is also something integral in Star Trek that has taken a back seat since 2.0, especially since habitability has so little impact now (compared to before). I aim to fix that by changing things around. The focus of terraforming now will be about making certain inhospitable planet classes colonizable. Vanilla dabbled in that a bit with their ‘terraforming candidate’ and New Horizons always had such planets (terraformable but not colonizable), but those are going to get a major push in the next patch.
More importantly, terraforming will be strongly tied to your player species. What species you choose to play will define which planet classes you may learn to terraform, with Andorians who love the cold environment able to utilize planets that the heat-loving Vulcans never could. In fact, no matter which species you play, you could only expect to be able to eventually colonize and terraform about half of the available planets. No empire could gain access to everything, even if you have multiple species in your empire. This will again return interesting choices, as well as yield a performance increase (by reducing the number of colonies in end game).
Conclusion
The final goal is a true win-win – we hope to improve performance, while increasing the diversity and content of the mod, making it easier and simpler to understand, more canonical and even add more interesting choices… all in one.
Whatever we succeed or not, you guys will be the judge. Let us know once what you think once we release!