The larger they grown and the more empires they conquer, the bigger their chance of decaying, reducing their strength and increasing the window of opportunity for one (or multiple) of their subjects to rebel. More importantly, however, is that Awakened Fallen Empires now start to decay after 20 years of waking up, and it has a chance of increasing every month.

They have also replaced the tradition trees for Hive Mind empires with more consistent and fitting options and lore, added special interactions with the Prethoryn Scourge, and likewise altered or removed events that made no sense for that specific kind of Hive Minded empire (looking at you, political protests).Ĭrisis have been tweaked, with the most noticeable one being the complete change of the old AI crisis into a new one called 'The Contingency', where an ancient and dormant AI can be awakened by the presence of synthetic pops and will attempt to sterilise the galaxy of all intelligent biological life. The team also reworked genetic modification into a more modular system of templates, and added a variant mode which lets you modify robotic Pops in a similar (if non-genetic) way. Even the way you create a game has been slightly altered, with new options to partially randomise the number of empires, advanced starts, and fallen empires adjust Crisis Strength (replaces the old galaxy size/habitable worlds slider) and change the chance of Primitive Civilizations being generated.

Aside from paving the way for the expansion, the 'Čapek' update brings a host of free features, ranging from simple 5 new achievements and bug fixes to much needed sector and combat tweaks and end game scenarios. The patch notes for Stellaris v1.8 have dropped, and Paradox went at it with a passion.

Stellaris apocalypse endgame contigency