Stellaris players: okay, time for amnesia №16. Let's learn how to play this new game.

stellaris traits is like >your species have the strenght to destroy concrete with your bare hands, the strenght to stand up against thanos himself and maybe take a punch of a super saiyan >bonus: +10% army strenght

About time we get machine ships and backgrounds, was always weird to see them using the bio empire ones.

Robot group 1: we are one. We work and grow as one. Robot group 2: Hay every body my name is Bob and this is Mike. Oh and Todd, Ed, John, will, Sam, and doom bot 9000....she's new 😅

I think a good way to reflect machines' digital immortality while retaining the eventual decay of their metallic bodies is adding some sort of additional leader pool for "dead" leaders, like it being their backups. The same could for example applied for necromancers (for obvious reasons), genetic-ascended (like replicating your dead heroes as clones from DNA depository or something) and psyonics (like extracting the dead soul of their beloved from Shroud like Orpheus and Eurydice)

Just wanted to mention that on the Dev Dairy the 'More Nanites for the food' is a typo and appears to have been changed to 'More Nanite for the Flood.'

1. The 90% housing usage reduction for Virtual pops makes sense, in that, they still need some physical machinery to interact with the physical world, eg. mining. Also 90% is the cap for every kind of reduction. 2. Individualistic machines seems a bit like lithoids with extra steps.

Thematically the machine habitability stuff makes sense. A tomb world would likely be caustic and abrasive. A waterbourne machine might utilize the water around them for heat disipation and so on.

I feel like a more immersive solution for the robotic lifespan would be to keep the current random death chance, but give you an option to repair your dead leader for alloys or unity.

Nanotech empires: "We are eating the dry walls and you can not stop us."

Imagine lost colony machines where they find their original creators that would be cool.

I think a good idea for balancing out individualist machine leaders, which I assume is the reason for removing immortality from synthetic, is to have them undergo transference instead of death. Have it function like death with the same rules and chances, but instead of the leader being removed from the pool they instead get reset down a few levels. That way you still have "immortal" pops but leaders cannot just stack exp forever.

I desperately want a unique gray goo become the crisis. Instead of building the aetheric engine you get hungrier and hungrier, maybe converting entire planets into more nanites like a paper clip optimizer scenarios.

22:07 you just established previously, that Research Assistants trait is +2% all research and is a 0 cost trait.

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me.

I had a 400 year old leader once. Started a necrophage game (actual necroid portrait) the oldest I've ever had. I rarely have machine leaders last 250. Also, if we get void dwelling machines I'll accept all the nerfs with grace

I like that living metal and nanites are getting more uses and more ways to get them

Art generator machine background 💀💀💀

30:16 I think the Energy Credit upkeep is "0.1 per colony, per pop" so for 4 colones, it will be .4 energy per pop

I also think there should be a age reset thing. Maybe one of the new accessions give you a true immortality by spending a load of resources when a leader dies, giving an event. That or we make the vault of knowledge actually good somehow. Slight XP reduction but more trait picks/level cap/output of traits.

21:08 I hope Individualist Machine Empires get their own version of Syncretic, so that it can be used to make something like The Culture, where the secondary species isn’t limited to Worker Jobs.

The habitability change isn't much concern. I recently dug up an old hivemind build. Subterranean silicoid gestalt. The only planet that wasn't in the green for colonization was the Grunur tomb world, at least until the research completed. Having every single planet class available in the green at the start is quite the sight. So I don't know if this would be as great an issue for mechanical pops as well.

38:03 uh, neural chorus is quite clearly collectivist. A chorus of minds is a way I've seen a hive mind described before (i.e. Ubral Choir from endless space 2), and the way the edict is worded gives a hive mind vibe.

I wonder if you could do wide virtuality by releasing sectors as vassals and making those vassals small enough to also really benefit from virtuality. Like a distributed server network full of scholariums.

We always enjoy your dark tangents and side stories. I demand more of them!

6:20 pantheon is such a cool, deeply interesting and unique sci-fi i watched it twice back to back

Do we think that the nanite path is also a new crisis path simultaneously? Because this feels like it has to be a crisis type. Im super excited for that if thats the case.

Machine empires should be immortal, but increased likelihood of developing negatives as time goes on to account for logic flaws and other technical problems. I would also like to see a more likely situation of a rogue AI being a problem, same with how there should be more biological pop internal problems. Right now, each empire is considered a perfect society and I can’t imagine that future for any manner of race/being/empire.

Also this is going to make my 1k year living metal - nanite maintained God Empress Listhim D'vhakk a truly unique save and experience to have played. I truly understand the fallen empires and just wanted to "prune my garden" allowing the species I found Co-operative to bloom.

Man, this looks like quite the overhaul for machines in general. Interesting though. Ironically, not counting the combination with Subterranean, the +50% minimum habitability is still weaker than a Lithoid's +50% habitability modifier, because habitability tech will still look at the base habitability first, so a tomb world will remain 50% for a machine even with habitability techs (because it'll start at 0%, and if the techs bring it up to, say, 25%, that just gets overridden by the minimum habitability), whereas a Lithoid starts at 50% with that modifier and goes up with every habitability tech. So Lithoids are actually better than machines now in the habitability department, unless I'm missing something, which is an interesting balance shift. And yeah, machine leader being immortal sort of always had a large asterisk next to it because of the random accidents that could befall them. Still, if you have a solid 90 years before they're even at risk of dying, there's a good chance you can have enough tech to make them functionally immortal like you can with biological pops. As mentioned, where a bio pop could have a leader lifespan that ends up past the game end date, a machine leader at that stage of the game could randomly have an accident whereas bio pops don't have such a risk. Substance abuser still makes sense; if biologicals can affect their minds with drugs, machines can affect their minds with specialized programming. In fact, it's even easier to mess with their mind code deliberately I think. For virtuality, 90% makes sense to me for both balance and thematics. I mean, after all, those servers have to go somewhere, and they may still be pretty beefy even with advanced tech. It is very much a "tall empire" focus route.

11:40 so glad that part made it into the video, that genuinely had me interested keep up the great work!

Would be nice if machines could swap/upgrade to a new body, but maybe lost 1 level from each skill in doing so to account for readjusting to the new body. Alternatively, rebodying could put a timed penalty to all level skill bonuses of like -80% to start scaling down to 0% over 10 years.

If the content in a dlc / expansion is full and feels like a good experience - both short term and in the long run - then I have no problems paying a 'premium'. However, I'm not talking Diablo 4 $100 "premium" prices...

Something interesting, they stated in the dev diary that driven assimilators could go down the cybernetic assention tree? Then gain some new traits. But dang I had no idea

I'm most excited to see the wide-build opportunity that Nanites are going to delve into. Hypothesis: next expansion will be a spiritualist rework of the shroud and spiritualist ascension, then the trinity will be later completed with a biological ascension and biological hivemind reworks (and living, biological spaceship skin, please).

I believe the lifespan and habitability rework makes the machine playstyle less unique and I don't think that access to the origins can compensate for that.

Two things i would like to see: 1. Workerbots should give a bonus to energy and food production as well as minerals 2. For RP i would like to see a new species trait for bio and synthetic granting immortality but hacecthe chance of leaders dying in an accident like the synthetic leaders until now

I’m surprised we don’t have the ability to approach death on robot Leaders like the reformat Node option. It starts your leader at Level 1, but with an amount of XP and maybe even some traits based on their prior build. I feel like that better mirrors the idea of replicated consciousness more than “you get one backup, no more”

for the virtual ascension, be a shattered ring start, and gain access to that gaia world at the center of the galaxy (i forgot the name) that is massive. thats your colony base. everything else is to build mega structures and star bases.

I kind of like the idea that machines can last indefinitely, but the longer one is kept alive they become more and more expensive to maintain. Sort of like they're using legacy hardware and it's harder and harder to find replacements for it. Maybe you could even get a decision to make whenever the leaders are about to become non-functional where you decide if you want to replace their parts or not.

The individualistic bots are the thing i like the most in the game. Finally no more one mind bots and can i have a good robot friendly empire that can have organics aswell.

I think the mechanical leader lifespan change is a huge mistake and is nerf to Synthetic Ascension specifically, which really didn't need a nerf to begin with. The statement from the devs that the new system means mechanical leaders will live longer is entirely false, and I think there's a lot of confusion (because it isn't documented in game) on how malfunctions currently work: Looking at the event code, every 10 years, there is a 10% chance that ONE assigned leader or your Head of Research will suffer a malfunction, killing them. If you have the magic chair, this event never fires, and if you are a machine empire and have one of the synchronicity traditions, the event chance drops to 5%. In practice, this means a game should have an average of 2-3 (1-2 w/ the tradition for MEs) mechanical leader deaths, that will not affect any council position aside from your Head of Research, assuming you unassign them from their other job (planet governor, etc) before the turn of the decade. The new proposed system, in a 300 year length game, will result in far more leader deaths. It seems that a lot of options of getting around this are being provided for machine empires, but not for Synthetic Ascension empires. This puts Synthetic Ascension in a really weird position, where we have our pops scan their brains, turning them into data, and then upload them into robotic bodies that we created and fully understand, but we can't repeat this process to create backups or repair the bodies that we created? Even in real life, this isn't how things work. Data can be preserved through computer and through different parts. A CPU might burn out, but it can be replaced. A hard drive might go bad, but we have backups that we can move to a new drive. How are we more advanced in data preservation than a space age empire that has mastered the stars and synthetically ascended? From an RP perspective, this makes absolutely no sense. From a balance perspective, having truly immortal synth leaders is already something we essentially have. As I mentioned earlier, you're only going to be losing 2-3 leaders per game, and your most important leaders can easily be immortal. Despite this, Synthetic Ascension isn't OP because of this, at least not from what I've experienced, so I don't see why this shouldn't be the case moving forward, especially since Synths are also losing their habitability bonus. For machine empires, I think it makes sense to have a lifespan at the start of the game. The machine empire didn't necessary create and design themselves. They might not know how to easily replace themselves and copy their minds. And they have 3 new ascension paths which can remove this limitation. Also just a note at the end, the lifespan repeatable is called "Cell Revitalization", why would that do anything for mechanical life forms?

Hmm, seems like virtualisation would synergise pretty well with megacorps - time for AWS to head to the stars, it seems!

As an avid Rogue Servitor player, I am very interested in how virtual ecuminopolis will play out

Im a machine empire main and I found your argument at ~7:40 to be very persuasive and my previous anxiety has been relieved and re-channeled into enthusiasm, thank you for doing the analysis

Im going to enjoy seeing how the gigastructures birch world mod handles virtuality.

With the age I'd have liked it more if bio pops would get a random accident chance similar to the way machines sometimes die. This would stop bio pops from living longer and would also make it so that you don't just have the same leaders all game in some cases.

Machines die out of old age? That stinks. In my opinion of course. Hope they will U-Turn on that, but I wouldn't expect it.

I imagine a robotic Syncratic Evolution as working like the Thals and Dalek on Skaro, but the Daleks have instead decided to enslave the Thals rather than wipe them out.

I'm so looking forward to this, I've been wanting to play individualistic machines since synthetic dawn released. The changes to habitability is actually really cool to me and I like the flavor of having to retrofit your pops for habitability. The leader lifespan thing is a bit weird but I'd say you'll probably have less problems than before, and being able to reset age with ascension means you'll probably never have a leader die to age anyway. I'm so very pleased with all this and I'm excited to once again give the ring world origin a try with virtual ascension because that sounds good.

I run a pretty standard Machine empire build focused on research and pop production. If youre buildung simulation sites on your planets you hardly ever need maintenance drones. I use these simulation sites mainly as unity production while they give amenities as a bonus. With 2 upgrades to the simulation site giving it 6 jobs is total it takes a while until you need maintenance drones and even then there is later game stuff that can bring it down to zero again.

12:15 you can shield electronic compartments against radiation. Considering the radiation in space, I'd take it as granted that machines are adapted enough to have figured out electronics shielding against radiation and such.

What im thinking is the virtual ascension may be vey strong ifyou can release vassals, you can just create full worlds and fill them with pops then release them. Instant full economy vassal

Substance abuser machines...there was an entire Futurama episode about this!

This is basically synthetic dawn part 2. I love it, can we get a Nemesis part 2 and a Distant stars part 2 as well

We need more portraits for machines. There have been very, very few additions to the pool of machine portraits since the beginning of DLCs for Stellaris, and I hope that we get at least one more row to our beepy lads.

Always loved doing tall plays, so I'm gonna enjoy the virtual reality stuff. Should be fun with things like ecumenopoli or mega structures. I imagine it'd also be a pretty flexible playstyle where you could react faster than usual when you need a new ressource being built or a building being manned.

I honestly still think, all Robot Paths should eventually be able to get immortal leaders. I can argue that the old ones get some kind of data-deformaties, like the robot version of Alzheimer or something going wrong with their parts but once Synthetic (superior) bodies, or even becoming Nanites should be unlocked, they all should become immortal. It even says "Immortality is within our grasp!" when we currently do synthetic ascension (and i am someone that goes Psionic nearly every game).

I am genuinely excited, haven't been excited like this for Stellaris in awhile.

I believe the moment Virtual gets to the megastructures, is the moment its growth changes from exponential, to quite literally vertical. Especially ring world.

AGING DEATH?!? WHAT???

Does this unit have a soul? Maybe, but this unit definitely has digital cocaine! BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ Edit: The Titan class machine ship looks like the gauss cannon from Doom.

I definitely get the change with machines having habitability, a machine designed to operate in a clean and regulated habitat environment certainly couldn't work underwater or in freezing ice deserts or mountains.

That Nanite path is very similar to the Nanite Expansion mod. Neat.

YAY were getting DLC for our DLC!

so nanites are like progenitors for machines and i like that the devs are really killing it w this update and dlc

Honestly, as a Machine Enjoyer ™, I like the habitability change. It actually makes your starting planets matter and gives you a reason to terraform planets beyond just clearing blockers. And, it makes sense that a machine that is designed to withstand a specific environment would struggle under different conditions. Plus, Machines get more Origins to play with which is totally worth no longer being able to blindly settle every planet in the galaxy. Not sure how I feel about the lifespan change, but if the devs are correct in saying it will actually allow the average machine leader to live longer, then I'm for it.

Well Ringworlds with Virtual pops are going to be bloody OP.

Great Video!

upkeep from jobs will scale well for ACOT

are the background cinematics available somewhere? They look awesome!

I think it would be cool if they made a robot accession where the robots decide to become organic ( kind of like the opposition of how organic species can become machine/cybernetic)

There needs to be new machine species portraits for these ascension paths.

It probably wouldn't be practical to implement, but I think machine leaders having a lifespan now would be more palatable if flavored as "data corruption". The idea being that, overtime, machine intelligences build up errors in their memory, eventually to the point of catastrophic failure. This would also explain why the leader can't simply be copied over, as the new copy would have the same level of corruption as the original. As technologies are researched, this problem becomes mitigated, with virtual intelligences having solved it completely.

My plan for a virtual ascension playthrough is one Ecumenopolis and the four sections of a ringworld. Maybe, if absolute neccesary, a minerals station or planet.

Machines do hold Singularitys and life sparks, same as flesh sapients or energy based entities, the only difference is the vessel.

I'd love if they could implement something similar to Endless Space 2's Riftborn: Machines that have inverted habitability modifiers. Meaning, they can inhabit barren worlds, but not "habitable" worlds. Which would mean it's impossible for other pops to exist on their planets, but they wouldn't have to worry about things like terraforming or poor planetary conditions. It could be a civic exclusive to machine empires called something like "biophobic". And maybe they would still be able to live on non-barren worlds, but would suffer large happiness penalties for the low habitability compared to their normal counterparts.

Digital Conscience Machine Empires reminds me of The First from Star Ruler 2(pretty underrated Space RTS alongside its prequel), basically a whole empire composed of organic beings that transferred their consciences to a Matrix but after seeing the outside world is not doing well they had to step out of the virtuana and have to build their empire again using Servers and Fabricators because they dont have a physical body anymore.

I don't wanna keep having to re-learn all these systems man

I always thought it was weird that robots had that massive habitability boost. I've worked on some (extremely rudimentary) robots IRL, it was a small rover meant to drive around in a desert, and we had a lot of difficulty trying to build the thing to withstand those conditions. In theory you *could* design a robot with all sorts of features that make it quite adaptive to different environments, but that would require an investment of resources... sort of like adding the adaptive trait to your species. IMHO the habitability change makes a lot of sense.

Virtual is perfect for my play style I love playing tall and tend to stick to 3 worlds so a nice 100% buff to output will be amazing

That is probably how long the individualistic have before they go insane

29:00 Perhaps this means there is synergy between Ocean Paradise-origin and Virtual Ascension, as planet size and the capacity to increase it might be rather useful if you can only have so many of them. ...well, until Paradox wants to add Chairman Drek to the game.

The thing with +50% min. Habitability could be very powerful with the Shasttered Ring Origin, since it ignores the -habitability blockers on the other ring sections

Now we need all of that for Hive mind and i'm happy

5:41 Basically if Robot empire have nanobots, what could repair and create anything then they can be immortals so clearly Devs dont have as much of imagination what players can have.

Just some thoughts I had, watching this video, on how I'd implement some of these things that are currently unknown. Though I don't know if the engine could support this. Also, I'm not an expert on how to balance Stellaris, so any numbers I supply probably need changing. For the Virtual Leader trait, I think I would change how the leader pool generates leaders. Every year, you have a percentage chance to add a leader to the pool, starting at 100% and decreasing by 5% for every leader already in the pool. If a leader dies, they would be returned to the pool and lose all their progress to the next experience level (to represent restoring a backup). Dismissing leaders from your empire would also send them back to the pool (just like killing them). You would also have the ability to kick leaders out of your leader pool, which would free up slots for new leaders to be generated. That feels like a flavorful way to represent keeping unneccesary leader programs in deep storage until you need them, then loading them up long enough to complete what they need to do, then turning them off again until the next time you need them. With the nano-drone ships, make them faster and more evasive than corvettes and use less fleet capacity (say 2 or more nano-drones for one fleet capacity, rounded up so that 3 drones costs 2 fleet capacity). But this is at the cost of them only having one S-slot weapon slot and one S-slot component, with no A slots at all. They would also get an innate trait that prevents them from being targeted by L-slot and larger weapons, but they also take double damage from S-slot weapons, and more from P-slot weapons. (I've been playing Sins of a Solar Empire recently, and messing around with the Corvettes in that game. If you wanted a more faithful copying, that innate trait would instead give them immunity to any hostile auras and system effects, such as from Titans and Starbase buildings. And complete immunity to the Zroni Storm Caster sounded a bit powerful.)

Machines decaying and dying reminds me of DSs in ‘Behold!Humanity’ where the moment something becomes sentient, even if digital, it begins to decay. it’s core code strings slowly unraveling over the course of its life span. and eventually it’s too unraveled to be repaired and they die.

Excited excited EXCITED! I am playing mostly machine. Did i say how excited i am about this update??

Thinking about the new things, there is an origin i would really like to see, a rogue world origin, i think it would be a pretty challenging idea and that would be cool as hell too

virtuality is awesome. It finally allow bio-tropy with budding. (and I guess it has some other minor bonus too)

Virtuality is more like the Virtual Endless or the Vodyani in Endless Space 2...very cool i like the concept

26:00 You forgot that servers are in need of space so 90% reduction indeed seems plausible. The housing need also includes *THAT* and is not only for regular apartments/houses with kitchen, bathroom and a bed or three.

to the Habitability, it could also make sense, that Machines would have Problems living on Artificial Worlds like Habitats, since of the Heighten doses of Radiation that come from there being no Strong Magnetic Field to shield them

I’m very excited for the Individualistic Machine Empire

Individualistic machines could have the same Ship of Theseus-based objections to mind uploading/transfer (or just a general belief in a soul) that many of us humans do so at least an option for normal aging rules could still be thematic

"They're not people; they're machine. Replicators!"

Virtual Ascension seems like it could be VERY exploitable by splitting off a vassal whenever you have too many worlds. Granted I'm not too familiar with the mechanics around vassal loyalty in Stellaris, but I would assume out of any liege-vassal relation, same-species machine intelligence-to-machine intelligence would have the highest base. Hell, if not, I'd argue a Subnet vassal type would be in place.

Awwwww ya, let Gray Goo it up. The resource monkey in me loves this new path. Though it does make me wonder if the L-gate is gonna be different for this path given they are the same thing as the Gray tempest.

I want to stack neural Chorus with the Expansion tradition, then when you colonize you get 3 pops just starting out, plus if you do syncretic evolution you can boost the servile pop growth speed. Combine that with gene clinics and that new thing that gives you an extra medical worker and you're looking pretty solid with pops. Of course, there's always the virtual world if you want to ignore literally all of that. Lol