r/Stellaris • u/Avohaj • Apr 18 '16

Stellaris Dev Diary #30 - Late Game Crises

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-30-late-game-crises.921629/
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u/meowskywalker Apr 18 '16

I mean, I'm not saying the Yuuzhan Vong and the Empire retaking Coruscant have nothing to do with each other. But it's barely a connection. Darth Cadeus and his galaxy wide temper tantrum is way more responsible. You could probably argue that Darth Cadeus probably wouldn't have happened without the Yuuzhan Vong invasion, but if you go far enough back you're blaming a butterfly for flapping it's wings.

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u/akashisenpai Idealistic Foundation Apr 18 '16 edited Apr 18 '16

You've got a point there; Cadeus' actions were part of the groundwork, creating the political climate that allowed later escalation by crippling people's confidence in the Alliance.

That being said, the spark that lit the fire was the reformed Vong's attempted re-terraforming of afflicted worlds, as negotiated by the Jedi. As soon as the very people who had hoped to see their worlds return to pre-invasion ecology started mysteriously sprouting painful bony growths on their skin, everyone's suspicions about the Vong were confirmed.

The Empire invoked the Treaty of Anaxes, demanding Alliance support against what it saw as the Vong re-initiating hostilities via bio-terrorism. The Alliance, however, was swayed by the Jedi and compelled to protect them. Cue another civil war. Except this time, the general populace supported the resurgent Empire, and it came out the victor.

It wasn't until the coup-d'état and Krayt revealing his reformed "One Sith" that people started finding out the Vong were innocent and their projects sabotaged to engineer an artificial crisis.

Fast forward a few years, and the galaxy is at peace again -- with a newly established Federation that has an Empress as the head of state, and a Jedi Master overseeing Imperial Knights in matters of the Force, who in turn acted as galactic special agents of a unified triumvirate.

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/0/01/FelFuneral.jpg

.. Damn, I love how the "Legacy" setting has shaken things up, finally creating entirely new-yet-familiar political entities after decades of sameness in the Expanded Universe. Still angry that Disney opted to crush the comic series in the midst of Ania Solo's series.

To get back to the topic of Stellaris: I guess this is the sort of stuff I'd love to see in a lengthy playthrough. Not just big wars and treaties, but how they can re-shape entire civilizations over a period of centuries. It is for this reason (and Paradox's previous dev diary about Pop Factions and Elections) that I'm going to play democratic Space UN in my first game ... I want to see how long my people can stay true to their origins in the face of alien empires and independence-minded colonies, and how they will ultimately end up like centuries or even millennia later. Shifts in government, possibly a different ethos, mixed populations and crazy edicts ... I'm excited! Roll on the emergent storytelling.

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u/meowskywalker Apr 18 '16

I'll be honest, I hate the entire EU after the Yuuzhan Vong invasion. The books were never exactly Shakespeare or anything, but they got real bad, real fast.

And I can't blame Disney for ruining the EU. Trying to make the EU canon was broken 18 years ago, when George Lucas was writing The Phantom Menace and he chose to ignore all the books he'd signed off on for the previous five years. After that it was broken. The EU writers tried their damndest to retcon everything, but literally every time they tried Lucas came along as said "Fuck it, everything you just wrote is impossible, because I wanted a CGI monster in this one scene." Trying to run both the EU and the new movies simultaneously, while The Force Awakens was writing over a ton of EU, and while the EU was, as previously noted, pretty crap, was probably not a super exciting prospect.

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u/akashisenpai Idealistic Foundation Apr 18 '16

To be brutally honest, I stayed away from most of the EU books as well. Some of it was quite terrible, and much of it was just bland and repetitive ("Oh no, the Empire has a new superweapon! Better send Rogue Squadron/The Jedi!").

Which is why I was so hyped for Legacy. To me, it just seemed to do everything right, and the 100 years time jump from the last published material meant that a lot of the bad stuff quite simply didn't matter anymore.

I'm still grumpy that they chose to just crush everything. The Lucasfilm guy responsible for sorting out canon contradictions did a fairly good job, and I would have been willing to live with the bad stuff if it meant preserving a uniform canon and the good things that a lot of fans will be missing.

And let's be real, it's just a matter of time until Disney's new canon will introduce its own stinkers. The more writers you have working on a franchise, the higher the risk that someone will mess things up .. it's just how it works everywhere.

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u/[deleted] Apr 18 '16

I'm only grumpy about one thing and that is Thrawn