Some teasers for the new trade route system:
Twitter linkThe dev diary covering all of this should be tomorrow I think, but the teasers about piracy are particularly interesting. I wonder if the notion of pirate bases and explicit pirate fleets will be gone completely in the update, which I'm torn over. On one hand, it's kind of ridiculous that the pirates can spawn with a bigger fleet of better ships than the player in the first few decades, but on the other it can be fun to fight them when not much else is going on early game. In most of my games, pirates were the only thing I fought until the crisis hit.
Relatedly, I'll jump on the bandwagon of wishing for civilian ships in systems, but I'll be very, very surprised if they add something like that.
On another note, in my last game I did actually get lots of defensive wars. That led to the amusing and somewhat frustrating scenario where the spiritualist awakened empire declared war on my for the fourth time, so I decided to bomb and take their homeworld to set an example. Immediately after doing so, one of my admirals founded a spiritualist faction in my materialist empire, which is sitting at 0% happiness. I can't tell if she was just moved by the plight of the octopus men she'd just helped bomb into submission, or if she'd forgotten all of the ships they destroyed in the last 3 wars she was in with them...
That's what I get for trying to occupy a planet with spiritualist pops, I guess.
Edit: link to the
dev diary.
I'm not so sure about requiring all trade to route to the capital system, but I can understand the mechanical reasons for it. It would also give me a reason to move my capital world, which in the past I've only ever done because of the achievement for putting one on a ringworld.
I do really like that hangars on starbases will help combat piracy, since it gives me a reason to build them now. The overall changes to piracy look pretty good, and it looks like they will be keeping pirate fleets under some circumstances.
Hopefully the need to patrol trade routes with your fleets will also open up some variation in fleets and give us reasons to build things other than battleships and corvettes. My suspicion is that battleships will be the worst choice for it, although maybe carrier cruisers will be the best, again giving a reason to build such things.