Lastly, ground fighting will now cause collateral damage to pops and buildings on the planet, so a particularly fierce fight-or an invasion by unfeeling xenomorphs-can leave a newly captured planet almost entirely in ruins. Combat width, familiar from Europa Universalis, will also reduce the benefit of invading with overwhelming numbers of weak troops. These buildings take up a planetary tile and require population to function, but dramatically improve a planet’s defensibility. Defense armies have been boosted, and are now tied to defensive buildings called Fortresses that produce defenders and reduce Unrest. The ground combat system is also getting an overhaul so that ground-based defense is actually feasible, if you invest enough resources. The new Fleet Manager system will make reinforcing and building fleets dramatically easier: you’ll be able to set a specific template for each fleet, not just of types of ships but their configurations as well, and automatically set your starbases to replace ships missing from the fleet. The new Fleet Manager in the Stellaris Cherryh Update Photo: Paradox Interactive The penalties for tech and unity from having a large number of planets will be reduced, and the number of pops will no longer affect tech and unity at all. The Cherryh Update will expand Stellaris’s technology system, adding new tiers of technology and many new technologies, while also making the spread of those technologies and the order you reach them more sensible. Missiles have been simplified and beefed up combat computers expanded and a new system of War Doctrines introduced, allowing empires to set overall strategic military considerations in exchange for bonuses.

The armor and shields system is more transparent and aims to make a greater variety of ship configurations viable. Reactors will now be fixed and limited to one per ship, although auxiliary boosters can still increase power output.

It will be more important to have multiple fleets to defend your borders, and to attach an admiral to each of them. Second, ships can now disengage from an ongoing battle (even without an emergency FTL), meaning that many ships on both sides will be damaged rather than outright destroyed after a fight. First, it gives bonuses to the smaller fleet to ensure they still inflict losses on the bigger one. The Cherryh Update aims to destroy this dependence on Doomstacks in several ways. Stellaris has long had a Doomstack problem: whoever brought the biggest fleet to a battle tended to win, and the loser of the battle was so seriously crushed that the war was effectively over.

Smaller fleets will get combat bonuses against large fleets to help break the power of doomstacks.

Stellaris apocalypse unrest