Stellaris made a great impression when it hit earlier this year, bringing Paradox’s brand of grand strategy to space for the first time, but like all the publisher’s initial releases, there was room for improvement and expansion. The upcoming patch, called Heinlein, will add some new features that sound like very smart additions to the game.
The first is Auto-Explore. After your empire reaches a certain size, you’ll get access to a new technology that lets you automate the efforts of your science ships. The developers wanted the early game to still have a strong focus on exploration, but this compromise alleviates late game empires from a whole lot of micromanagement.
Another big addition is Rally Points, allowing newly constructed ships to immediately fly to and merge with a selected fleet. There’s also an Expansion Planner, which will let you see all planets that you can colonize or build resource collectors at, and a rework of how strategic resources work as a whole.
You can see the full details of these features in the latest dev diary, and we expect to hear about even more new features that the Heinlein update will bring very soon.
