Even after more than five years since its initial release, Stellaris continues to push the boundaries of what's possible in the game. Paradox Interactive just dropped a trailer announcing it latest DLC, the Aquatic Species Pack. With it, players will be able to chose and Empire species that survives in an ocean-based environment. While a release date hasn't been announced yet, interested fans can add Aquatics to their Steam Wishlist.
The DLC is planned to launch alongside an update called 3.2 "Herbert", named after the Dune author Frank Herbert. The update will include features that the team didn't have time to include in the previous 3.1 "Lem" update. It also promises to add even more exciting challenges against the AI for players to complete. Here's what fans should know about the update and DLC.
Aquatic Species Pack
As with past species packs, Aquatics will add a new category of species classes for Empire portraits, background, city design and ship/station appearance. It's not yet known what specific traits and civics will be added, but it's likely related to the Aquatic theme. It can be assumed that the Aquatic origin will have Empires begin on an ocean world as their home world, with unique planetary features and blockers.
Like the ocean, there are more secrets and danger the deeper you go, and the developers have hinted that great monsters lie in the darkest depths of Aquatics. It's possible these monsters might appear as part of an Aquatic's special origin story -- perhaps even as new Guardian Creatures.
New Features, Events & More
A new Civic being added is the Pompous Purist, which allows for a diplomatic playstyle, but for xenophobes. It increases and Empire's trust growth and adds two available envoys, though they'll only be willing to negotiate with other species as long as they are the ones proposing. Any attempt at initiating diplomacy will be completely ignored by Empires with this Civic.
The ship browser is being improved so players can view all of the different ship classes with each species types to better choose which vessels you want representing your Empire in the galaxy. Back in 2018, anomaly failures were removed from the game, but now, every anomaly (even the old classics) have been reworked to add choices at the end of these events that can help your Empire in a variety of ways -- or hinder it with the wrong choices.
Finally, terraforming planets has been made to be more exciting with a few new random events after the process is complete. These bonuses vary from getting more districts of a chosen type to possibly uncovering a dig site to finding buried ancient relics. For those hoping to continuously get events by constantly terraforming planets, these events are not only not guaranteed to appear, but if they do, they'll only occur the first time a planet has been terraformed.
Improved AI Empires
One of the best parts of the "Herbert" update will address one of the community's biggest complaints: the AI Empires. Even on higher difficulty settings, the AI becomes far less effective in managing their Empires later in the game, making them far too easy to dominate. However, this update intends to fix the economics scripting and subplans so that virtually all Empires are able to have a positive income in resources and adapt whenever there's a deficit. Plus, rather than build new artificial Habitats to colonize, AI Empires will now be more likely to choose terraforming tech options to research as well as the appropriate Ascension Perks to terraform planets and colonize them.
Headed by the Custodian Initiative, the developers have made it clear that this won't be a one-time fix for the AI. Rather, the team intends to consistently improve the AI's performance with each new update. Plans include making each Empire more distinct and stay in character rather than simply being optimized to min-max their way to victory -- they might even be able to better defend themselves against Crisis Forces.