Blast Off! Stellaris Launches Asimov Update

Paradox today launched the second big update for their space strategy game Stellaris [official site], named 'Asimov' after the first man to snog a robot (after the bot bit his probing tongue, he devoted his life to lobbying for anti-robot laws). Changes include having borders open by default, expanded diplomacy options including diplomatic incidents (break out the Ferrero space-Rocher!), new skyboxes, new nomadic fleets, fixes, interface changes and... look, the patch notes are five thousand words long, I won't summarise everything.

As ever, the patch should download itself through Steam. The full notes are over here (click the 'Spoiler: Changelog' button to see) but Paradox have also explained the key changes in friendly announcements.

This one here talks about the new open borders, influence costs for building colonies and outposts to balance out those open borders, the removal of Embassies and their replacement with 'trust', expanded diplomacy options, and joint war declarations with other empires.

This-a-way Paradox get into tweaking how battles work so they look cooler, new map view modes, reworking nomadic fleets so they drift through the galaxy with various intentions before leaving, slave vactions, diplomatic incidents such as accusing science ships of spying, and new goals for war - including taking tributaries, making an empire abandon a planet, stopping atrocities, and straight-up humiliating empires.

This one? Just pretty skyboxes.

The next big update will be Heinlein, named after the chap who invented a manoeuvre for forcing robots to spit out the human tongue they're gnawing on.