Games and their developers seems to be in a never ending power struggle. When one update goes live, the team is already hard at work on the next. There's always a bug ready to be squashed, and it's the main focus of the next Stellaris patch - Stellaris 1.6 'Adams'.
Reportedly starting development the moment the Utopia expansion and its free 'Banks' update came along, the Paradox team already knew of a multitude of ways to tweak the game following the massive expansion. Having only launched on April 6, it's surprising to hear of another major update so soon - but it is without a release date right now.
Dev Diary #50 made not of a list of changes and a scaling list of priorities the Stellaris team had identified and outlined for their attention going forward. Calling it the time 'Beyond Utopia' there's already a preliminary list of what the 1.6 'Adams' update will bring - those with a strike-through have already been completed.
- [S]Ship appearance that differs for each empire, so no two empires' ships look exactly the same.[/s]
- [S]More potential for empire customization, ability to build competitive 'tall' empires.[/s]
- [S]Global food that can be shared between planets.[/s]
- [S]Ability to construct space habitats and ringworlds.[/s]
- [S]Factions that are proper interest groups with specific likes and dislikes and the potential to be a benefit to an empire instead of just being rebels.[/s]
- [S]Ability to set rights and obligations for particular species in your empire[/s].
- Deeper Federations that start out as loose alliances and can eventually be turned into single states through diplomatic manuevering.
- Superweapons and planet killers.
- More story events and reactive narratives that give a sense of an unfolding story as you play.
- More interesting mechanics for pre-FTL civilizations.
- A 'galactic community' with interstellar politics and a 'space UN'.
- Buildable Dreadnoughts and Titans.
- Reworking the endgame crises to be more balanced against each other and the size/state of the galaxy.
- Reworks to war to address the 'doomstacks' issue and make the strategic and tactical layers of warfare more interesting and less micro-intensive.
- Deeper mechanics and unique portraits for synthetics.
Much like the Banks and Utopia packs, patches going forward are either designed to squash bugs or introduce more ways to customise your empire or to tweak internal politics. Making special mention of the ability to build Dreadnoughts and Titans is a clear example of this.
The team will start talking about specifics over the next few weeks. And, of course, we'll update our patch page once the full list goes live. Until then, you'll just have to wait for the finer details.
