Stellaris is getting space nomads and scenarios for its 10th birthday

Most strategy games that make it to 10 years old have already passed the event horizon of their development cycle and are being pulled apart like spaghetti by the gravity of the thousands of new games released every day. Not so for Stellaris, Paradox's spacebound grand strategy 4X. How it got to where it is and is still drawing in intrepid stellar statebuilders is a saga worthy of a Star Wars title crawl. But it's not even done yet, with the newly announced Season 10 finally bringing space nomads to the table.

Nomads, with a current release date of Q2 2026, will finally let you play a species without a homeworld. This is something that Paradox has wanted to do for a long time, but posed significant technical challenges. We got to chat with game director Stephen Murray about what's coming.

"For years, I've always wanted mobile planets," Murray said. "That was always the impossible dream. The programmers would run off screaming and crying anytime we mentioned it... So after [last year's big patch] 4.0, we had an extended period of bug fixing and things like that. And we have the thing called PDT: personal development time. Everyone can basically do what they want to, as long as it helps the project, for a day. And we had pulled all of these days together into a full week of PDT because we were too busy to actually take off a day a month.

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"And the team came together and were like, 'We're going to prove to you that we can do nomads.' And I was like, 'Really? Do you really think that you can pull off a successful prototype in a week?' Now, I say that in this sort of, you know, not demeaning way. I was really hoping they'd succeed because I've really wanted to do nomads for a long time. But I had to give them that challenge of, 'I don't believe that you'll be able to do this.'

"And boy, did they step up. By the end of the week, we had an interesting prototype that didn't make people scream and cry. And they were like, yeah, this is how we're going to split the colonies and ships and planets, and integrate the ship into it. And we totally have ideas on how all of this design will work. And then, you know, the next week I was like, 'Well, OK, you've convinced me.'"

(Image credit: Paradox)

The core of your nomadic empire will be a massive vessel called an arkship that basically functions as a mobile planet. You can specialize it for either a military, civilian, or scientific focus and upgrade it in much the same way you do terrestrial worlds in Stellaris now. There are even new origins that let you play as, among other things, the galaxy's most lavish cruise ship. And you'll be interacting with your gravity-bound friends and rivals a bit differently than other empires."If you conquer new planets and that sort of thing, you'll spin them off as vassals or have the option of playing as that vassal," Murray explained. "You'll also be able to settle onto planets eventually if you desire, giving up your arkship and turning it into infrastructure on the planet. Or at the reverse, say you're losing horribly in a war. Maybe you should consider greener pastures and flee your planet-bound existence and build an arkship to get away."If you're like me, the first thing that came to mind on hearing that was Battlestar Galactica fleeing from a machine revolt—something that can already happen in Stellaris. And I wasn't alone.

"Absolutely, that was kind of what we were hoping for," Murray confirmed. "We want to be the quarians who go back home and land. You want to play as [the colonial fleet from] Battlestar Galactica. I mean Battlestar Galactica was one of the things in my initial pitch deck after I approved their prototype. We must cover this fantasy."

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The other, bigger expansion in Season 10 is called Willpower, which will focus on shaping and spreading Ideologies. Stellaris has always had ethics like Materialist and Spiritualist that define the things your people strive for and how they might interact with other species. But Willpower seeks to take that a step further, even possibly pitting empires with similar ethics against each other.

"If I have a spiritualist Ideology and you have a different spiritualist Ideology, then they will bicker and fight against each other most likely," Murray explained. "You'll have to be careful that you don't lose ground to their ideology and they become the dominant one in your empire. [But] we were pretty specific that this is not the religion expansion. Spiritualist Ideologies are kind of religions, but we have Ideologies for all of the ethics, not just spiritualism. So you can have Human Rationalism as an Ideology that you'll spread. And then the aliens that you expose to this may pick up your habits and want to join it and follow some of your tenets and things like that."

Alongside all of that, Season 10 will introduce scenarios to Stellaris that use its base mechanics in ways that are quite different from the standard 4X grand strategy mode. One is a king of the hill-style PvP game meant to be playable in a shorter amount of time than a grand campaign. Another is a roguelike about guiding one ship across the galaxy.

(Image credit: Paradox)

"I've always wanted to do some sorts of constrained scenarios," Murray said. "There's a lot of stories that we want to tell that we can't because there's this whole game there. The example that I always used was a Fallen Empire rolls up to pre-FTL Earth and it's like, 'Hey, here's some knowledge data banks and stuff like that. We just lost our fleet to the Prethoryn Scourge. You just need to hold up for 10 years, 20 years and we'll be right back!' And just playing these sort of short game experiences.

"In Hearts of Iron you can play a game and be done in a night or day or whatever. Eight hours is enough to do a campaign. In Stellaris it is not. And sometimes I want a shorter play session and accomplish something and feel like, 'I did this.'"With the ability to really tweak the rules and starting parameters of a campaign, Paradox hopes modders will surprise them as well.

"The players are the ultimate source of creativity out there," Murray continued. "The entire MOBA genre was created off of one of these sorts of systems. The scenarios that we have are very constrained in different ways for whatever the playstyle is. The way this works is you can be like, 'The physics research file—it doesn't exist.' You can just blacklist that. I really want to see what [modders are] able to do with Stellaris if they can blacklist or whitelist things and systems and you know just go nuts. So I don't actually know what the scenario system is going to bring us, but I really want to find out."

Season 10 makes it seem to me like Stellaris isn't ready to slow down any time soon. But if you want to know how it got here and where it might be going in the even more distant future, check out the other part of this interview on the 10th Anniversary with Murray and Paradox's Chief Creative Officer Henrik Fåhraeus.