Paradox promise extensive support for Stellaris
Paradox Development Studio have a clear cut approach to supporting strategy game Stellaris for the PC. Writing on the Paradox forum game director Henrik Fåhraeus explained that that the team "promise to keep improving the game for everyone, almost like an MMO", as long as "enough players keep buying paid content for the game".
It's a fair arrangement, and in the same forum post Fåhraeus outlines the initial plans for post-launch support:
"For those of you who are unfamiliar with our post-release policies, we will release a lot of expansions over the coming years," Fåhraeus writes. "Each expansion will be accompanied by a major update (for Stellaris, these free updates will be named after famous science fiction authors) containing a whole bunch of completely free upgrades and improvements to the game in addition to regular bug fixes."
The first update, the Clarke update, or version 1.1, will arrive by the end of May. The highlights are as follows:
"CLARKE" HIGHLIGHTS
• Fixes to the Ethic Divergence and Convergence issues. Currently, Pops tend to get more and more neutral (they lose Ethics, but rarely gain new ones.)
• The End of Combat Summary. This screen looks bad and also doesn't tell you what you need to know in order to revise your ship designs, etc.
• Sector Management GUI: There are many issues with this, and we will try to get most of them fixed.
• Diplomacy GUI issues. This includes the Diplomatic Pop-Ups when other empires contact you, but also more and better looking Notifications, and more informative tooltips on wars, etc.
• AI improvements: Notably the Sector AI, but also plenty of other things. This kind of work is never "finished"...
• Myriads of bug fixes and smaller GUI improvements.
• Late game crises bugs. There were some nasty bugs in there, blocking certain subplots and various surprising developments.
• EDIT: Remaining Performance Issues. We know about them; they might even be hotfixed before Clarke.
• EDIT: Corvettes are too good.
Clarke is just the first step in a plan towards the inclusion of a category of events called "colony events", which is supposed to be "the bread and butter of the mid-game for the Science Ships." This first patch is mostly bug fixes before the real work begins.
Check out our review of Stellaris over here.